QA outsourcing implies handing over the responsibility for testing process management and the quality of outcomes to a reliable vendor. Software testing outsourcing allows organizations to optimize testing costs, release internal resources, gain access to world-class QA methodologies and tools, and improve the general QA maturity level.
TestSquad can support your fast development pace and help you release high-quality software by planning, implementing, and continuously optimizing the QA process, as well as establishing effective and transparent collaboration with the development team and stakeholders.
Depending on the project complexity, delegating software testing to an experienced QA outsourcing company can save 20-30% of a project budget and 10-15% of time to market.
Here are some other reasons to turn to outsourced QA.
With outsourced QA and software testing, you get the team of a precisely needed number and expertise. A service provider takes off the burden of both looking for a qualified QA professional or a test engineer and educating the existing ones to obtain competence in the project specific testing types or tools.
Getting a professional team of balanced number and qualifications along with transparent quotes helps to make the QA and testing budget coherent and predictable. If the project scope allows automated testing, the efforts and thus the costs will get another reduction.
A quality assurance outsourcing company can introduce an outside perspective and a set of professional practices that tend to be several-fold more effective than just relying on your in-house resources. Also, the involvement of an external team psychologically encourages both the developers and the employed QA staff to find and eliminate possible defects
QA outsourcing providers rely on advanced test management, bug tracking, and test automation tools and technologies to make the testing process faster and more efficient. Among the most popular test automation tools in use are Selenium, Appium, Ranorex, Microsoft Coded UI Tests, etc.
Choosing a reliable outsourced software testing company, you get the best testing practices, test automation tools and frameworks to reduce testing time and efficiently address your project requirements and deadlines. Additionally, with QA outsourcing, you can get to a higher QA maturity level and reach your software quality management goals much quicker and easier.
Relying on our 34 years of experience in software, TestSquad singles out three main points to pay attention to when searching for a reliable QA and testing vendor:
1. Expertise. A vendor’s competence can be proved by QA software testing certificates (ISTQB or QAI) of outsourced test team members. A trustworthy company should work by data security regulations and standards (HIPAA, PCI DSS), quality and testing standards (ISO 9001:2015, ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119). In addition, a reliable vendor will always present references and success stories.
2. Sufficient resources and services. An outsourcing partner should have at least 5 times more testers than you need at the moment. Your software testing vendor should be able to perform all testing types (automated or manual; web, mobile or desktop; functional, performance, usability, compatibility, API, security testing, etc.). Even if there is no need in some of them now, when it comes to scaling up, your vendor will easily ramp up and provide a wider testing scope.
3. Self-management. The main idea of QA outsourcing is to assign the time-consuming and scrupulous testing process, QA issue management, and its improvement to a qualified external team and focus on high-level quality management, the code creation, software design and integration. So, a vendor should be self-managed to cover everything coming within an efficient QA process: from the assistance with a requirements specification development to continuous testing during the whole application lifecycle.
Before looking for a perfect match among QA outsourcing vendors, make sure to be ready for future cooperation.
1. Streamline your workflows. The major touchpoints between you and your future QA outsourcing provider during the testing process are normally software requirements specification, existing and updated code, and found and fixed bugs. Before starting to work with any vendor, you should clear up where the needed information is stored, how often it is updated, what relevant tools your developers use and what bug reporting procedure you find convenient. The more information you provide to a testing outsourcing vendor, the less time the initial partnership formalization will take.
2. Assign a senior-level QA manager. You need in-house management to cooperate with a vendor more effectively by:
3. Motivate your development team to cooperate with an external test team. The lack of inter-team communication may result in poor understanding of software requirements, late changes of a test plan, unclear bug reports and, consequently, missed iteration goals and deadlines. So, the assigned QA manager needs to persuade the stakeholders that the only way to create a smoothly operating solution implies cooperation and mutual understanding.
1. Regularly assess the vendor. Assessing a QA outsourcing vendor systematically helps to ensure that your company gets exactly what you’ve aimed at. Evaluating your testing vendor will give you a multidimensional overview of how effective the vendor is. Here is the sample list of assessment criteria:
2. Manage vendor performance. For your QA outsourcing vendor to continue rendering their services at the same level or step up, your dedicated QA manager has to supervise their performance. This includes:
TestSquad performed functional, usability, and compatibility testing of a video streaming application and its numerous customized versions on 15+ target devices.
We carried out automated functional testing of an innovative cross-platform desktop application for image processing and validated its integration with third-party tools.
TestSquad’s team did functional, usability, and integration testing of an LCMS product line comprising web, mobile, and desktop apps, and verified their compatibility with SCORM.
To provide the estimation, TestSquad takes into account the following factors:
One-time performance testing for a mobile app, website, or non-complex web app.
Code review of back-office software.
Continuous managed testing for a company with 3–5 constantly evolving apps.
Testing for ERP development project characterized by a 12-month duration, 2-week iterations with parallel testing, 100 new test cases per iteration, 90% total test coverage, and 70% coverage by automated tests.
A phishing campaign combined with white box network pentesting.
One-time penetration testing of a client-facing app.
Comprehensive testing of a big data solution (with operational and analytical parts) in parallel with development.
Compliance pre-audit (HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, etc.).
Infrastructure security testing for a midsized organization.
ooperation with TestSquad as an information technology partner unfolds as follows:
Choose this option, if you need to close a gap in the QA and software testing competencies or resources for one project.
Opt for this option, if you need to reinforce your QA and software testing on a variety of projects.
With this option, you won’t need internal QA resources at all –we provide all-embracing and full-cycle QA support. Still, you’ll have full control over the delivered services due to regular test execution and KPI reports.
This option best suites the companies seeking to boost their QA process maturity. As a software testing company backed with 730+ successful testing projects, we can help you introduce an effective QA process, increase the test automation rate, fit testing into CI/CD or assist with TCoE setup.
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