Is Your QA Maturity Holding You Back? Leaders Need This Audit

Quality is a critical aspect of the software development world. However, to achieve the quality benchmarks, putting more testers on the code problem is not the right solution. Also, since the advent of AI-based solutions and frameworks, enterprises are moving towards turning testing from a reactive activity to a proactive one. And QA maturity is the core aspect of getting there.

For business leaders, they should know where their QA maturity stands and how it’s going to affect their delivery progress. Let’s dig deep into this blog to understand the criticality of QA maturity assessment, QA process gaps, and the steps to transform a QA strategy into a predictive and sustainable model.

The Leadership Risk of Low QA Maturity

Let’s understand the risk of low or no QA maturity from a live example. In the early days of Google, they faced issues related to feature release and bug fix delays. The reason was slow manual testing. Although the frontend automaton attempts helped, the urgent need for QA maturity began to grow as the company’s product line expanded. After that, Google split its testers into two roles to test maturity:

• Test Engineers: A group of product and quality experts focusing on a deeper understanding of testing.
• Software Engineers in Test: A division of tooling and infrastructure specialists that built automated testing tools and frameworks.

After that, Google expanded the role to “Software Engineer, Tools, & Infrastructure,” to optimize the entire dev and QA Maturity cycle. These new roles expanded testing further by building new tools to automate coding, product release, and production monitoring.

For leaders, they must know the risks involved with low software testing maturity. The risks involved are:

• Delayed and missed deadlines lead to increased rework and impact business performance.
• High costs due to rework, poor defect management, and last-minute fixes.
• Unoptimized use of available resources
• Unreliable releases result in a loss of customer trust and damage to reputation.
• Lesser agility in accommodating changing customer needs

A QA maturity model encompasses more than just testing. It aligns the testing process with enterprise goals and ensures that QA expands in parallel with business operations, focusing on technical performance and agility.

What are the Symptoms of a Stagnant QA Function?

Testing is a traditional and siloed way of quality improvement. However, leaders often miss the signs of stagnating QA maturity. The reasons include:

• Getting stuck in a reactive mindset during the development cycle can lead to delayed releases and expensive bug fixes that would’ve been prevented.
• Communication breakdowns within the team can slow everything down and create all sorts of inefficiencies in the development cycle.
• Challenges in providing required coverage during testing, and as a result, bugs getting leaked to production.
• Longer testing cycles causing delays to your go to market due to heavy reliance on manual testing.
• Those traditional QA setups we’ve all been using for years just can’t keep up with the modern software development and deployment methods – and it’s holding you back.

These issues may sound small, but they are silently killing your digital transformation efforts and harming your business agility. As a leader, you have to keep tabs on such red flags and conduct a thorough QA self-audit.

Assessing QA Maturity Across People, Process, and Tech

Leaders must assess their current maturity level before transitioning from a reactive QA to a proactive QE model. For this, the QA capabilities assessment strategy will focus on three key pillars:

People:

This pillar is all about how the skills, hierarchy, clarity of role, and overall quality culture of your team are shaping up. You need to make it clear who’s responsible for what – for example, who in QA, operations, and development is doing the day-to-day testing, and who are the software and test engineers that make it all happen.

Process:

The second pillar is about checking the effectiveness of your testing workflows and methodologies – are they consistent, working well, aligned with business priorities and repeatable? Are you getting the most out of DevOps and Agile, or is your testing a bit of a free-for-all? Have you laid out the process for tracking bugs, writing test cases, and all the rest? And are your QA standards being followed from the start of the SDLC?

Technologies:

The third pillar is where you analyze actual tools and tech infrastructure that underpin your QA efforts. How much of the testing do you have automated, and are you set up to scale up if needed? Is your testing tool nicely plugged in to your CI/CD pipelines? And are you taking advantage of some of the latest tech like AI/ML, or GenAI and Agentic AI?

Why Are Automation & DevOps Central to Modern QA Maturity?

QA maturity is linked to automation. Recently, there have been improvements through the use of GenAI and Agentic AI in test automation and DevOps practices for QA maturity. One can say that automation is a must-have aspect for leaders who aim to achieve faster and reliable release cycles. The better the automation practices are, the faster they can identify defects and enhance test efficiency.

Within a CI/CD pipeline, continuous testing maintains the software’s quality in the Agile environment. Leaders should know how automation and quality gates can help them achieve continuous and predictable quality. If they don’t leverage automation frameworks and integrate QA within DevOps pipelines, they will face the consequences. They have the responsibility to promote a quality “as-a-culture” mindset within their teams and drive continuous delivery to stay ahead.

Creating a Roadmap: Evolving from Reactive QA to Quality Engineering

Transitioning from reactive QA to proactive QE needs a structured and quality-focused roadmap. It will include aspects for cultural change, skill development, automation, and continuous integration throughout the SDLC. Let’s take a look at the roadmap to quality engineering (QE):

Current State Audit:

We begin with a comprehensive review of your SDLC processes, tools, and skill levels. It’ll give you a clear picture of where you’ve got gaps and what you need to work on. As a leader, the key is supporting quality as a business essential – not just something that’s nice to have.

Remediation Planning & Prioritization:

Following the audit, results are consolidated into a structured remediation plan. This helps define priority gaps, improvement strategy, dependencies, and sequencing across short-, medium-, and long-term horizons. Improvement opportunities are evaluated based on business risk, delivery impact, and organizational readiness. This step ensures changes are planned, achievable, and aligned with business delivery and transformation goals.

Shifting Left & Breaking Down Silos:

Once you have a clear idea of what you’re working with, the next step is to get testing embedded in the development cycle from day one. That means breaking down the silos that typically develop between development, QA, and operations teams. Ensure everyone is aware of their expectations and introduce automation in stages.

Automation & CI/CD:

Now that you’re off and running, it’s time to invest in a solid automation framework using tools like Playwright, JUnit, and Selenium, depending upon the underlying technology stack. Then, integrate automated tests into your CI/CD pipelines and run non-functional testing (performance, accessibility, and security) throughout the entire SDLC.

Continuous Improvement & Optimization:

This is the ongoing aspect where you utilize synthetic monitoring and observability tools to track exactly what your software is doing in production. It’s also about identifying patterns in defect reports, day-to-day processes and practices, and then using quality metrics to improvise further. It enables you to collect real-time user feedback.

Why TestingXperts: Your Partner for QA Maturity Acceleration

TestingXperts helps accelerate QA maturity with its tailored quality and performance-focused solutions. Our services include:

Capability Assessments:

We do in-depth checks on where you are now with QA and help you identify the gaps and opportunities for making things better.

TCoE (Testing Centre of Excellence):

Setting up a TCoE and getting best practices, standards, and governance sorted out in one place, so everyone across the organization is using the same approach to QA.

Automation Frameworks:

We can help steer the implementation and scaling of automation frameworks that will save time and cut down mistakes.

Quality Engineering Integration:

We work with you to build quality engineering into every bit of your SDLC, so quality isn’t something you tack on afterwards; it’s inherent in your processes from the start.

Conclusion

To wrap it all up, QA maturity is crucial for enabling your enterprise to produce high-quality products efficiently. By conducting a QA audit to identify potential issues, determining when things are slowing down, and developing a solid plan to take things to the next level, leaders can effectively ensure their organizations stay ahead in the digital transformation game. And if you have the right strategy in place and collaborate with the right partner, such as TestingXperts, you can truly advance your QA maturity journey and unlock the full potential of your software delivery process.