Why holistic quality assurance is essential – founding Hidden Trail

In May 2021, a quality assurance consultancy called Hidden Trail was founded. Polar Squad was the driving force behind the founding process. Why did Hidden Trail come to be? Why is QA a critical component of DevOps?

The decision to found Hidden Trail was driven by real-world experience: Top-tier test automation and quality assurance know-how are both in demand and hard to come by.

“We had past projects with freelance test automation consultants, and this led us to realize there might be a great opportunity. Test automation has immense potential, and doing it with freelancers piecemeal just didn’t cut it anymore”, says Teemu Korpela, co-founder of Polar Squad, responsible for our ecosystem.

Project by project, the decision to found a test automation company gradually materialised.

“After a few projects, the decision to found a test automation company felt like the next natural step, so we started talking to trusted test automation professionals”, describes Teemu.

From test automation to quality assurance

According to Antti Forsell, co-founder of Polar Squad in charge of people operations, a pivotal moment came in one of the first discussions. “Our former coworker and testing mastermind Jani Grönman described how test automation is just the tip of the iceberg: we needed to broaden our horizon. Test automation in itself is valuable, but when it’s part of a comprehensive quality assurance strategy, it becomes essential.”

Jani put into words what we saw in our projects with freelancers: current ways of working are geared towards creating tests – the bare minimum to have something resembling a test strategy. To make testing valuable, you have to align your testing strategy with product and business goals.

This encapsulates the spirit of quality assurance: quality needs to be a leading factor in all your processes. Testing is often an afterthought, and the passion or skills for proper quality assurance are often nonexistent.

Jani became the first founder of the yet unnamed company. The search was on: We had to find people who had similar values regarding quality assurance and felt strongly about fixing it.

According to Teemu, the QA professionals they talked to agreed that the time is right for this type of a company: “Once the ball got rolling, the process was surprisingly easy. Quality assurance is a tight-knit scene and the people we had on board had traction – practically everyone we talked to recognized we had a great team and the right ambition.”

In the end, the best possible end result was reached with five industry veterans on board: Jani Grönman, Jukka Pajunen, Pekka Marjamäki, Niko Nousiainen and Toni Nylund. Read more about each illustrious character here.

Meshing together

Polar Squad and Hidden Trail are natural partners. Both operate under a simple premise: To provide outstanding quality and expertise, you need a clear focus. That focus needs to be safeguarded through controlled growth, very careful recruitment decisions and the daring to decline projects that fall outside of your focus.

What’s more, the focus areas of the two companies have just the right amount of overlap: DevOps is a holistic discipline that supports development, and QA and test automation are an inseparable part of the picture. Each company can hone its craft to perfection, focus on the key functions and build an internal system of mutual support.

From a business perspective, this is a way to control the growth of Polar Squad as a company. Quality assurance is a complete, extensive discipline, and takes a lot of effort and resources – integrating it as part of Polar Squad would change the company structure quite a bit.

The Polar Squad ecosystem is already strong with regards to software development, admin, strategy and other services – we work closely with both Bravedo and Reaktor, which gives us breadth. This, of course, holds promise for Hidden Trail, as they join this network of companies with a completely new skill set to offer to clients of the network.

Blazing the trail 

Looking forward, Hidden Trail has its sights set: the simple task of world domination lies ahead.

“Hidden Trail has such a great core team that Polar Squad doesn't have to worry about operative matters. We laid the groundwork together and set the strategy – now the founders can blaze their trail. We collaborate on sales and admin, clearing these obstacles so Hidden Trail can focus on what they do best”, Antti describes.

Hidden Trail and Polar Squad also have a shared top-level objective – together, we provide an alternative to large corporate IT consultancies:

“Smaller, nimble and specialized actors are good for the market; we want to eliminate our clients’ concerns whether their consultants have the specialised know-how needed for their projects. With Polar Squad, you get the best DevOps expertise, and with Hidden Trail, you have the industry-leading quality assurance specialists working for you”, Teemu says. “The mission of Polar Squad is to make tech work meaningful – Hidden Trail is evidence that we’re at a point where we can accomplish this mission.”