Given the following scenario:
- a company is working on a complex product - multiple teams working on multiple connected apps/microservices, sometimes more than one team works on a single application
- each team has a dedicated QA engineer
- product is growing more and more complex and more apps are added
- more developers are hired in order to keep up with customer requests but only occasionally new QAs get hired
- dev/QA ratio gets skewed so QAs start supporting multiple teams at the same time
Provided that the number of QAs won't catch up with the number of devs, which of the two options (I'm sure there are other ways of doing this, but I'm interested in these two) of reorganization is preferable in order to keep the quality at the respectable level:
- Keep the QAs connected with the team (even when the same QA is a part of multiple teams)
- Link the QA to a particular app (so they support an app, regardless of the development team that is currently working on it)
The first approach seems to conserve more of a team spirit, IMO, but the second could be better for the overall quality, but at the price of the tester losing the sense of belonging to a team.
Do you have any thoughts on that or experience with it? What are the pros and cons of each approach?