Quality Assurance Outsourcing

Its quite a contradictory situation when a very small ISV that has 4 own products and runs the smallest QA and testing department – 1 person – stays afloat. The answer is very simple: first, its a 1 person team. Second, engagement of third party testers.

Its a widespread phenomenon when an ad-hoc development team is very difficult to get contracts in the US. There are several reasons for that: No credit in US, only SME’s will want to work with such development teams as they don’t really benefit from outsourcing their development team.

One more attempt was to try selling Transcription and Encoding services – bootless: a very good communications infrastructure is required for that – a very “wide” band. Next, Support services – here arose the same problem as with Transcription and Encoding. So, as a result the choice was made in favour of QA or its part Software Testing services.

The choice is conditioned by weighty factors:

• No huge bandwidth is required (testing builds can be uploaded to company’s website/ftp site)
• The same way to report Bug Reports and Feature Requests
• Usage of different AIM’s and VoIP clients to communicate with the customer

And the most important – you avoid scalability problems: as demand grows – the QA team can be easily expanded to eventually turn into a full functional QA department

However, some people consider that remote QA departments can be a real problem justifying with that they are too far away to work with. Some executives would never outsource QA as it is desired that every bug be clarified and discussed because not all outsourced QA teams document this kind of stuff while it is crucial in some moments. And the lack of constant communication between the two groups – developers and testers – will create obstacles for smooth work.

Some people complain about insufficient documenting of the bugs and malfunctions and lack of personal clarifications. But consider that most of this communication is done via email and its not necessary to see a person who does it all. It may be enough to have an on-shore representative of the offshore team – to coordinate things on site.