How to Create the Ultimate Quality Assurance Analyst Onboarding Plan

Whether you are developing software, a game, or a website, a quality assurance analyst (QA analyst) ensures that no bugs, defects, or any other errors affect your technical product development at any stage. Keeping your product error-free means that it can be deployed successfully and align with company standards. 

Happy customers: check. Happy managers: check. 

However, a QA analyst's learning curve can be steep. Every company has a unique mix of objectives, workflows, tools, processes, systems, and programming languages.

So, a poor onboarding process could complicate matters, causing your QA to perform poorly or even quit.

Therefore, you need an effective quality assurance analyst onboarding plan. 

This guide will explain why it's so important to plan and provide tips and best practices when creating a QA analyst plan. We also included a customizable onboarding template, which you can download right away.

✈️ Why is onboarding important for quality assurance analysts?

Research from SHRM shows that 69% of employees will stick with your company for three years if you provide them with an excellent onboarding experience.

"The 'purpose' element of onboarding is where you begin to lay the foundation of success for your new team member." Mitch Gray, How to Hire and Keep Great People.

So, a proper onboarding procedure is your best chance of keeping your new QA analysts for a decent amount of time. Some added benefits of onboarding are:

• Attracting a higher level of talent which puts you ahead of the competition.
• Ensuring your QA analysts have role clarity. 
• Enabling them to adapt to the company culture faster. 
• Increasing engagement and productivity levels. 
• Reducing product development delays.
• Saving the company money in the long term due to reduced time-to-productivity.

What does a proper onboarding process look like?

Traditional organizations focus on a short employee orientation period, share their expectations, policies, and company visions and missions, and provide basic training tools. That's it. Then employees are good to go.

But are they?

To improve customer engagement, your customer service team would focus on enhancing customer experiences. So, it would be best if you did the same when onboarding your new employee.

You can enhance your employee's onboarding experiences by:

• Rolling out the red carpet for your QA analyst using a welcome message.
• Presenting information about the various teams and their members.
• Automating onboarding tasks like sending documents for signing.
• Making relevant introductions to the QA analyst's new teammates.
• Regularly scheduling check-ins and meetings to understand where they are at.
• Creating a feedback loop and refining the process to suit the analyst's learning style and speed.

📝 Quality assurance analyst onboarding 30-60-90-day plan template

You should spend at least three months onboarding a new employee using a 30-60-90-day onboarding plan while personalizing it for every new hire.

"You must design a system for training and onboarding that gives people a real, fighting chance at success." Mitch Gray, How to Hire and Keep Great People.

Here's how to use our onboarding checklist to onboard your QA analysts.

Preparation & preboarding

Laying the groundwork is essential, so you can:

• Set out the onboarding metrics to use when judging your QA analyst's progress, such as the volume of support tickets sent.
• Send out onboarding documentation for reading and signing.
• Set up account access rights and prepare work passes.
• Schedule meetings with the product testing team.
• Send out the welcome package.
• Ensure the first week's orientation plan is ready.
• Create QA analyst-specific content based on all stakeholders' input. Integrate into the 30-60-90 onboarding plan. 

Your QA analyst onboarding plan should be about your company's objectives, clients, processes, and technical tools and systems.

Day 1

Do you know this feeling when you arrive at work on the first day and everything is so new? When your brain stretches every sense, desperately trying to grasp it all at once?

It's saying: "Remember the meetings' schedule. Remember what you said during the recruitment process. Remember to set up the computer. Remember people's names. Remember to smile. Remember to remember. Remember…" Dawid Dylowicz, QA Lead, and Owner of More Than Testing.

A lot is going on in a new hire's mind on day one in a new workplace, as Dawid Dylowicz reflects. So it's your job to eliminate first-day anxiety and make your new QA analysts feel welcome.

✔️ Greet your QA analyst in person alone or with the onboarding buddy. 

✔️ Host a lunch to introduce the product testing team, assign an onboarding buddy, and ensure the QA analyst signs off on compliance policies.

🖥️ For remote workers, book an introductory meeting and host a virtual lunch with the team.

✔️ Sort out access logistics—Ensure they have access to the business premises, systems, hardware, and necessary tools.

✔️ Finalize admin work, arrange any mandatory training and present the 30-60-90 onboarding plan.

The first 30 days

The primary goal of the first 30 days is to ensure that your new QA analysts understand your company's QA process, including:

• standards of quality;
• department-specific procedures;
• workflow and stakeholders. 

✔️ During week 1, schedule a 1:1 meeting to define their job roles clearly.

✔️ Since quality is a team effort, building team connections at the earliest stage is vital. Your new hires need to have clear contact points, i.e., understanding who to contact in case of specific questions or challenges. 

✔️ Schedule meetings to connect your QA with product leads, engineers, and other product-specific roles. These meetings provide excellent learning opportunities for your new hire. Encourage them to ask questions and clarify their understanding of the product and team. You can encourage them to find out answers to these questions:

•     What has been working well so far in developing the product?
•     What are users struggling with?
•     What are the biggest pains you can see in our internal processes?

✔️ These meetings will be complimentary to structured product and quality training. 

🧑‍🏫 Focus area: product training, focusing on features, customers, and pipeline: 

• product vision and unique selling points;
• product platform and architecture;
• compatibility with other products and services;
• customization potential;
• how to use the product;
• what current customers appreciate most about the product;
• current pain points and feature requirements;
• development pipeline and upcoming updates;

📖 Focus area: understand quality assurance activities, such as: 

• defining processes; 
• executing a quality audit; 
• identifying areas of improvement;
• developing tools like process standards and checklists.

💡 Tip: Encourage the new hire to take notes and share them with their manager or mentor: 

• It's a great exercise to ensure that your new QA understands your procedural principles and does not have any misunderstandings.
• It's also an excellent opportunity to ask and clarify any questions. 

➡️ Discover 15 best practices for training new employees for more engaging and effective training initiatives. 

✔️ At the end of week 2, set an assignment for your new QA analyst. For example, ask them to read through a specific product's reviews to determine what errors or bugs it has, then create a report.

✔️ After the first 30 days, consider carrying out an onboarding survey to get feedback from your QA analyst and other stakeholders about the onboarding process.

✔️ Supervise your new hire closely and regularly check in with their onboarding buddy. 

• Are they settling in seamlessly? 
• Do they need additional support?
• Are they starting to feel like a part of the team?

✔️ Set goals to measure the QA analyst's performance. 

Tip: When setting the goals, incorporate the insights you got from the onboarding survey.

Day 31 to 60

✔️ Depending on your QA analyst's performance in the first 30 days, provide employee feedback regularly while providing more autonomy.

✔️ Expand your QA analyst's role training by including them in an ongoing project and updating them on their background, including its challenges, design specifications, and client needs. 

✔️ Let your QA analyst shadow their mentor to get more hands-on training. 

✔️ Set goals for the remaining 30 days based on your QA analyst's training progress.

Day 61 to 90

Focus: Enhance the QA analyst's accountability and smoothly transition them into their designated team. 

✔️ Enable the QA analyst to work more independently. 

For example, the QA analyst can review a section of software under development, determine the design specifications and user requirements, and identify the proper parameters and data set. Then they can test and validate that program section to ensure it works and report any defects, bugs, or errors.

✔️ Let the QA analyst brainstorm with the team.

✔️ Ask for one more round of feedback from all stakeholders and determine areas of concern 

Tip #1: 360 feedback software is best for getting a holistic picture of the new employee. 

✔️ Determine their overall performance within the first 90 days.

Tip #2: Your onboarding plan can go beyond the first 90 days. 

Onboarding can take as long as one year; a more extended onboarding leads to enhanced employee retention.  

🆘 If you need other templates, we have you covered. Check out our free onboarding templates. You will find, among others, sample welcome messages, buddy surveys, and more. 

👀 What does an effective quality assurance analyst onboarding process look like?

To achieve the best result, we recommend that your quality assurance onboarding follows the 5Cs of onboarding:

• Ensure the QA analyst complies with company regulations by updating them on company policies and asking them to sign relevant documents. 
• Educate the QA analyst about their job roles and provide feedback when they seek clarity. 
• Familiarize the QA analyst with how things get done from day 1. Establishing culture from the beginning is way easier than trying to change or enforce it after years.
• Use networking tools like Slack to encourage your QA analyst to form connections with teammates. 
• Check back by creating a feedback loop and adjusting training for better performance.

➡️ Don't forget about engaging your new hires. We share 11 ways to engage new employees starting from day one.

⚙️ Why do you need to automate your quality assurance analysts' onboarding process?

Use automation to provide a streamlined onboarding experience for every hire and minimize errors.

You should automate your quality assurance analysts' onboarding process because it:

• Eliminates redundant tasks and frees up your time for other vital activities.

"We effortlessly scaled our onboarding across 50 locations, while our new hires rate their experience very highly." Barbara Imm, Head of HR at roadsurfer.

• Increases productivity enabling new hires to get acclimated to the company faster. 
• Improves employee management by allowing the QA analyst to perform onboarding tasks at their convenience.

For example, you can onboard your QA analyst before day one, familiarizing them with your technical systems, processes, and products earlier and improving their experiences.

• Reduces operational costs by reducing the labor that goes into onboarding.

➡️ You can use our preboarding template to start integrating your QA analyst before day 1.

➡️ Also, check out how Alasco reduced their time-to-productivity rate by 50% by making their onboarding process more structured and enjoyable. 

➡️ Set up your product new hires for success with Zavvy

Do you want to reduce your new QA analyst's anxiety and prepare them for the big day? 

Well, then, check out our preboarding software. It will make your QA analyst's preboarding experience more enjoyable.

You can also use our automated onboarding software to: 

• Reduce manual workload. 
• Seamlessly integrate stakeholders in the process with Slack integrations and automated event scheduling. 
• Cut the new hire time-to-productivity period significantly.

Book a demo to discover how our automated onboarding tool will take your onboarding to the next level.