Two weeks. Process review, tooling assessment, coverage analysis, team interviews, and a prioritized improvement roadmap you can execute on your own – or with our help.
A QA audit is a systematic review of everything that affects software quality in your organization. It is not a code review and it is not a test execution exercise – it is an assessment of the systems, processes, and practices that determine whether your software ships with the quality your users expect.
The audit covers six domains:
Our audit is a two-week engagement with a defined structure. The two weeks are intensive – we review a significant amount of material and talk to multiple people on the team. The output is proportionally detailed.
Kickoff and discovery (days 1-4): We begin with a kickoff meeting to align on scope and access requirements. Then we conduct structured interviews with the QA lead, engineering manager, at least two developers, and the product manager. We also review the existing test artifacts: test strategy documents (if any), test case libraries, sample defect reports, CI/CD pipeline configuration, recent test execution reports, and defect history.
Independent analysis (days 5-8): We analyze what we found in discovery against an assessment framework based on our experience across many software teams. We identify findings – specific problems with evidence, not general observations. Each finding gets a severity rating (critical, major, minor) and a root cause analysis.
Report writing and prioritization (days 9-12): We write the full audit report: executive summary, detailed findings by domain, and a prioritized improvement roadmap. The roadmap is sequenced by business impact and implementation effort – quick wins that demonstrate value come first, structural changes that require more time come later.
Findings presentation (day 13-14): We present the findings to the team in a structured review session. This is not a report readout – it is a working session where we explain the findings, answer questions, and calibrate the roadmap priorities based on team input.
The most valuable part of the audit is often not the findings themselves – experienced teams often already know what is wrong. The value is the prioritized roadmap that answers "which of the twelve things we know are broken should we fix first, and in what order?"
The audit report is structured for two audiences: the executive summary is for engineering leadership and stakeholders who need the key findings in two pages. The detailed findings section is for the QA lead and engineering team who need to understand the root causes and implement the recommendations.
The report includes:
Teams that use the audit report effectively treat it as a backlog – adding the roadmap items to their engineering backlog, assigning ownership, and tracking progress over the following quarter.
A findings report without a roadmap is an expensive way to get a list of problems you already knew you had. The roadmap is what makes the audit actionable.
We prioritize the roadmap on two axes: business impact (how much does fixing this improve software quality, reduce escaped defects, or reduce developer time spent on QA-related work?) and implementation effort (how long does this take to implement with the team's current resources?). High impact, low effort items are the first quarter's work. High impact, high effort items are the structural investments that follow.
The roadmap also distinguishes between two types of improvements: things the team can do independently using the audit report as a guide, and things where external help would accelerate the timeline. We're honest about which is which, and we don't design the roadmap to maximize future engagement scope.
A QA audit gives you a clear picture of your current state and a roadmap to improve it. A discovery call is the right first step to scope the engagement.
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