Multiple product-specific QA teams vs a single generic QA team?

Question

Our company has been growing and with it our products and the QA team. Our QA team previously has only handled a single "headline" company's product and had this "startup"-like flexible and agile relationship with the development team. But, now we've grown into a part of a bigger corporation, we've got a couple of new products that were previously internal and now are becoming important and going to become customer-facing which requires higher quality standards. We've hired new testers to handle the increased load, but now we have the following question to answer. Should we focus the new testers on this particular product and let them handle the testing and quality assurance, or should we make them a part of a "generic" QA team which is going to be handling all the products. In other words, should we have multiple product-specific QA teams or a single QA team handling all the products? What are the pros and cons of these two approaches?

Answer 1

Whether you want a dedicated QA team or a generic one, depends upon resourcing and budget. If the budget and resources are limited, you should structure your QA such that you have 1 or 2 dedicated testers as part of agile development with lead QA being spread around projects targeting multiple product lines. This will allow you to get the most from limited resources and funding perspective.