Tips for budgeting QA hours

Sometimes for QA it gets difficult to budget and track the QA hours as a person can spend enormous amount of time retesting the defects and performing regression if any. We can take ,as an example, a web application with 50 use cases.

What are some tips for budgeting QA hours?

From stackoverflow Chanakya

• Past history is a good indication of future performance. How long did the last regression take?

  Chanakya : I think regression grows with the new functionalities in application. Whereas defects and data preparation for retesting takes time
  From tloach

• Ideally there would be some empirical data to use a estimate

  • How are QA's recording an execution of a use case?
  • If they are not logging test execution time then they probably should be.
  • I always suggest that setup time/actual test execution time is recorded as this will then take in into account any interruptions a QA has during the test execution an provides a more realistic measure. (i.e. it may be a 5 minute use case to execute but if your QA is getting interrupted evry 5 minutes, using the estimated execution time is useless asa guide)

  Hope this helps

  From Dean

• Check out Evidence Based Scheduling. Admittedly it is geared towards developing the feature in the first place, but there is truth to knowing how much more you have to do and how reliable to code is to begin with. Some of the tasks in the schedule can be how long it took to perform the last regression test or how long it took to develop the unit tests.

  From Jason Z