Guidance on SA staffing (ratios)

[Norman Ralph]

Our company has started a Centers of Excellence for the SA role. One
of the exercises we are perfoming includes some guidance on staffing
ratios of PM/SA/DEV/QA. We have looked peripherally at some of the
industry sites, with little to no luck. Does anyone have guidance,
either industry standards or personal experience?

Thanks in advance.

[gbcambridge]

Hi,
these numbers / ratios depend a lot on the nature of the project,
methodology and your organisation. You have identified roles, but
there is nothing to say that each role is occupied by only one
person. In modern teams a person can take on multiple roles according
to need. There is the extra benefit in this of aiding the
communication through the group. The downside is that it can be hard
to find multi-skilled staff to take on these roles. A ratio that I
have often seen used is one PM to 6 developers to 2 or 3 QA to 2 or so
documents. That would be for a product with a heavy user-documentation
requirement. In your situation, and taking into account the
dependencies that I mentioned above, I would establish a core of
advanced practitioners for each skill set such as QA, SA, DEV, PM and
then propagate the broad principles to EVERYONE involved in projects.
Multi-skilling of teams is massively advantageous and if you can build
in that expectation at the beginning you should see the benefits
downstream. If you would like to discuss this in more specific details
please contact me directly.

George