Why you should consider Outsourcing your QA services
Testing for any application should be a dedicated activity. It is time and effort-intensive and requires commitment and coordination to understand the requirements, design, underlying architecture, application objective, targeted end-users, and demographic statistics, required performance, scalability, security expectations, and compliance regulations if any.
Outsourcing of testing services was previously done to primarily cut costs, but now, it is done to achieve better quality, on-time delivery and in general, to achieve better business results. Some of the key advantages of keeping a highly committed, highly alert & adept, highly flexible offshore testing team are listed below.
Cost Efficiency:
Return on investment is the most crucial part of running any successful business. Suppose you run an app development company and you do not have an in house testing team. If you decide to keep your testing in house, then you would need to hire testing professionals, pay their cost, provide the necessary infrastructure, train them on the requirements of your product, purchase tools and more than anything invest time and effort in doing all these. If you decide to outsource your QA, the cost would be several times lower, you would be assured of the quality because expert testers would be deployed, each with a specific skill set, deployed based on the type of testing needed, the tool used and the domain of the application. A combination of open source and paid tools would be put to use depending on the application and the best possible quality assurance can be availed with minimal trouble.
Expertise and Experience:
QA demands experienced testers who can understand complex functionalities, have good knowledge of how the underlying software is built, the ideal strategy to test, the specific tools to be used for each type of test, the critical points where the application could break and business vertical expertise. Also choosing a well-established testing partner would assure that the latest trends, strategies, and tools are implemented in order to provide not just the best quality but the best quality in the best possible, customized manner.
Better quality assurance:
Having a dedicated team of expert testers has a great impact in not just reducing the resource cost but also the cost incurred in fixing bugs that appear very late in the SDLC cycle. A specialist QA team would find issues in the design phase or in the coding phase by implementing continuous testing & test early –test often techniques, making the fixes so much cheaper when compared to an in house team that may leak a bug and realize it only during the production phase. This is mainly achieved by the unbiased testing that an offshore team would provide the couple, their stringent adherence to established and new-age test strategies, and their domain expertise. For eg: if you develop an e-commerce app, your QA team might have limited knowledge in this domain as they haven’t tested any before. But an experienced QA service provider would deploy resources who have worked on several such e-commerce apps and would be in a better position to provide better and a more robust list of scenarios, to find bugs that wouldn’t have otherwise been found and to find ways to increase overall test coverage.
No blame games:
An offshore QA provider will be ethical in his approach and face any problems that occur head-on. There will be no blame game as customer satisfaction is of utmost importance to them. This might not be the case when you engage an in house testing team.
Focus more on Development:
An offshore QA will make your development resources to solely focus on the core development rather than attend triage meetings, discussions with the QA, unnecessary back and forth that happens before the eventual bug fix. There would be no deviations. A dedicated Business analyst can discuss with the offshore team, get the necessary inputs, prioritize issues, and assign them to be fixed, whereas the developers are left undisturbed. In the same manner, you can focus more on the product itself and its marketing, statistical analysis, and strategies to make it better and rise above your competition.
Get Your DevOps done with QA:
It is essential that your QA and DevOps coordinate to the hilt. Any automation that QA does needs to be integrated into the CI/CD pipeline. Only then would automation bear fruit and give you worthy results. It is best to have DevOps and QA work side by side. With DevOps implementing a continuous development approach, the testing team’s pre-testing tasks, cleanups, and post-testing tasks are all automated. QA will be even sharper because they are expected to have the specific test cases identified for the build about to be deployed. The concept of running all regressions cases once a build is deployed is quickly becoming obsolete. Nowadays, DevOps and QA sit together and identify those areas of the code that are affected, run specific automated tests along with a sanity test, and certify the build. The implementation of specialized code and test coverage tools is also advised. Parallel execution of automated tests reduces the time it takes for the production deployment and hence making DevOps even more successful in what they do. All these are easily achieved when the DevOps and QA are situated in the same location. So make sure to outsource to a provider who has strong DevOps capabilities along with an established QA center of excellence.
The flexibility of resources:
When you outsource your QA activities, there is no fixed cost that you need to worry about. You may want more testers to work on your product initially but then want fewer people as the product matures, becomes stable and you move into the UAT phase. With an in house testing team, there are fixed costs and it becomes a burden, whereas a flexible outsourcing partner would be able to easily adapt to this change.
Never miss a timeline:
When the deadlines are strict, development always takes priority over-testing. Hence on most occasions, testing is left with little time to ensure that the product is free of critical issues, leave alone thorough rounds of testing, and following processes. Whereas in the same scenario, an offshore team would always strive and eventually manage to provide the best quality within the stipulated timeline. Processes and strategies would be followed, additional resources and tools would be brought in if necessary and the quality of the software would be the first and foremost of their objectives. Also by not worrying about testing, your team will be more efficient and the product you deliver to QA will be miles better in terms of quality.
Detailed Reports and Regular Updates:
If the testing is in house, the approach might be relaxed, processes and strategies might not be followed even if the timelines allow for it. With an outsourcing partner, you can rest assured about daily reports and status updates, weekly reports, and progress updates. You can count on every report to be detailed and contain the data that you need and in the way you want it presented to make your job easier.
Testing is an unavoidable task that frequently becomes an overhead. If you try to manage it yourselves, you could but improper testing or surface-level testing might cause you and your product to fall through on so many other fronts such as quality, end-user experience, security, cross-browser functionality and responsiveness, performance and ultimately, in terms of the delivery timeline. Stay without stress by doing QA without actually doing it. Outsource and get the best out of your resources.
Author: Mohan Bharathi S
Stream: QA
