QA Consultants: Future-proofing our company

QA Consultants is a Canadian technology success story and a case study of how to disrupt a static industry. Initially, the company provided testing resources for companies looking to outsource their testing requirements. By prioritising innovation strategies focused on dramatically improving client value and internal efficiencies, and spending millions on R&D to develop new testing methodologies, automation and internal processes, QA Consultants has today become a dynamic and rapidly growing IT services organisation, and North America’s largest dedicated software quality assurance and testing company. Peter Watkins, Chief Operating Officer, explains some of the key factors that have led to this company’s success and the role played in its development by the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP) and ITEA, among others.

Going local

Founded by Alex Rodov in 1994, QA Consultants has been in business for some 26 years, beginning as a subcontractor to the major players like Accenture and Deloitte before deciding to go directly to the industry, initially through staff augmentation. “When I came on board, about eight years ago,” Peter recalls, “we looked at the offshore market and made some fundamental strategic choices, one of which was to be local. This meant our clients would have direct access to our resources, whether in Canada or beyond. To be able to compete with Asian price points, we had to create a different model. And NRC IRAP helped us many years ago to find a way of improving the efficiency of our testing methodologies such that we could compete with offshore prices. This resulted in something called the TestFactoryTM . In essence, our TestFactoryTM enabled us to bridge the 30% inefficiency gap between development and testing. Not only were we able to get our price below that of offshore competition but we were also able to generate the benefits of being local. That was a great differentiator in building our business. In fact, NRC IRAP has always been enormously supportive of our research right through to the present and has been a key contributor to our success.

Criticality of software innovation

“As we applied more science, innovation and technology, the testing industry began to change quite dramatically. We’ve gone from manual testing to automation testing – we’re using the latest science of advanced model-driven based testing. Our engineers are Masters and PhDs. We’re building digital twins of factory robots and vehicles to do testing in a fully simulated environment. In short, the science of testing has helped us transform our business.” He goes on. “It stands to reason, therefore, that software innovation is critical to our business. We build systems to test systems and that requires systems engineers we hire, train and deploy. The industry is advancing rapidly and so we are grateful for our involvement in ITEA, and to NRC IRAP which was instrumental in bringing us together.” As Canada’s National Office for Eureka, NRC IRAP not only facilitated the connection to ITEA but also provided valuable support early on through various partnering development activities that introduced QA Consultants to potential collaboration opportunities beyond Canada’s borders. They also provided specialised advisory services through the NRC IRAP Industrial Technology Advisor, who supported them throughout their international collaboration journey, from coinnovation partner selection to project proposal development and execution.