Quality Assurance Outsourcing

Is outsourcing QA and Testing a productive practice?

The bulk of industry professionals believe that pure models of outsourcing don’t work as expected. These models lack proximity with the QA team and closed loop interaction. In general, outsourced QA work generated the following common feedback:

• Outsourcing provider didn’t grasp the product idea
• Outsourcing provider did not find all bugs they were supposed to
• Outsourcing provider did not clearly understand their task
• Deficient reporting

More satisfactory result was achieved when the scheme included an internal QA manager to interact and control the outsourcing team.

Did you meet the time frames while maintaining cost savings?

The replies to this question vary in a great range from very successful and perfectly-managed projects with significant cost savings to complete failure of efforts resulting in non-operational product as well as excessive expenses. We also should note that cost should never be the decisive factor when outsourcing QA. The cost of neglected QA or poor QA will be much more higher if a buggy product were released.

Which organizations you found yielded a good result for you?

Most of respondents would rather not to name the companies they worked with and they consider that asking for ongoing customer references and their content with providers’ service are sufficient. Some QA and test companies maintain a satisfaction rate metric of their customers by means of established interviews and questionnaires. You can ask for the report on this metric.

Which Outsourcing destination did you select? Ireland, Canada, India, China etc.

Most of pollees partnered with Indian outsourcing vendors. Most cited benefit except for low costs is proficiency in English and quality of delivered work outweigh other outsourcing countries. Also, one of the most cited advantages is strong management presence in America and QA labs in India. Some don’t like overseas outsourcing at all.

Is the factor of different time zones an obstacle for your communication?

An Outsourcing company with well-established processes and methodologies easily manages the time difference and increases productivity. The following cycle is considered to be very effective to turn the time difference to an advantage.

• Programmers upload latest builds and release in the source control the night before leaving for the day.
• QA team runs the test cases and generates reports on uploaded release and submit the bug tracking system for the programmers
• Programmers review the bugs and test reports and set to fixing bugs.

The above cycle is successfully utilized with outsourcing QA and test companies in India. Some outsourcing companies work even in multiple shifts to meet the tight time frames.

Any language barriers?

Language issues were addressed by companies through Internet Relay Chat and teleconferencing that involved outsourcing companies’ employees who were in United States.

What are successfully outsourced types of testing? Black box or white box? Load or Stress? Functional? Regression?

All of the above types of testing are quite popular and were tried by the companies.

Did you practice partial or complete transfer of your QA department?

The best model to utilize is to use an outsourcing team as an extension to their existing QA departments. Some of the companies used QA outsourcing vice versa – in particular outsourcing QA team helped the company to establish their own QA departments.

Was software background or computer education a requirement for you when hiring QA and testing people?

For the bulk of respondents QA and testing people were desired to have computer science and software background. Most recommended applicants had certifications by Sun or Microsoft or some other US based training and certification organization.