Budgeting QA time in web dev?

December 20, 2013 5:08 AM

For those working in web dev with a dedicated QA/testing team: what percentage/ratio of the project schedule do you devote to testing, fixing, and regression testing, especially when compared to planning and the time actually allocated to dev?

This is not going to be a 'gotcha' brought to my boss or anything like that. I just need a baseline.

posted by flibbertigibbet to Work & Money (11 answers total)

Best answer: Our standard calculation is 15% of the development hours.
posted by COD at 5:35 AM on December 20, 2013

Best answer: I work for an IT consulting company in the group that does custom web software development and our standard budget is, for 40 hours of dev work, 12-16 hours (depending on complexity) is budgeted for QA and 4-8 hours for developer rework.
posted by graymouser at 5:37 AM on December 20, 2013

Best answer: I have used 30% of dev for QA and that includes test strategy, data identification and set up of test scripts/cases as well as execution. That's for functional and regression. Developers would take 10% of their Dev hours for defect support. That was for testing on four different browsers. This was financial services IT.
posted by polkadot at 6:15 AM on December 20, 2013

Best answer: Also, if mobile testing was in scope, that went up to 40% depending on OS/devices in scope (we typically did iOS 6 on iPhones 4S and 5 and iPad 2 and a few different android devices with gingerbread/jelly bean, kindle fire and blackberry.)
posted by polkadot at 6:21 AM on December 20, 2013

Best answer: To be clear - like polkadot, our group uses that time for designing test plans as well as actually executing them.
posted by graymouser at 6:26 AM on December 20, 2013

Best answer: Our standard is 25 percent, which includes PM time throughout the project.
posted by JuliaKM at 6:37 AM on December 20, 2013

Best answer: I'm not involved in costing QA in my current work situation, but in other places it has been between 15-35% of development time, depending on the breadth of the browser matrix, platform, and project scope. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the amount of trust in the dev team.
posted by ardgedee at 7:26 AM on December 20, 2013

Best answer: I should specify - my 15% mentioned above is just QA activities by a dedicated QA team. We assume another 20% of the development hours for PM time.
posted by COD at 7:28 AM on December 20, 2013

We do 5% but we use Selenium so most of the testing is automated.
posted by rada at 8:28 AM on December 20, 2013

Best answer: In data warehousing and at our current client it's actually 50/50!
posted by sandmanwv at 10:45 AM on December 20, 2013

Best answer: I'm on the QA side of things, but we estimate testing time will be equal to dev time. This obviously varies, but I think it averages out to about equal.

Edit: sorry, that's software testing, not web testing.
posted by shesdeadimalive at 11:52 AM on December 20, 2013