Why Outsourcing Software Testing Is Better Choice for Your Business?

Software testing is a vital part of the software development lifecycle. The primary goal of testing is to identify and detect mistakes and errors made during the implementation phase.

However, if your in-house staff does not have expertise or experience in the area, you will face challenges in the software implementation phase that can significantly cost your business.

Resolving any issues with software after the deployment phase can be difficult, time-consuming and incur greater costs.

In order to save time and money, you should outsource software testing to an expert. Their services can address both major and minor faults within your system to ensure its successful implementation.

In this article, we discuss why outsourcing software testing services is a better option for your business than in-house testing.

What You Need to Know before Starting Outsourcing Software Testing

Outsourcing software testing is a must for making the most of the expertise available in the market. However, not every software testing service offers the same kind of testing service you would expect.

On the contrary, choosing the wrong testing service provider can harm your business instead of helping it. This is why you must consider the following factors before choosing a software testing service provider.

Experience in the Testing Industry

Software testing is an extremely technical process and needs to be done thoroughly and with great attention to details. However, if a company does not have relevant experience in software testing, it will be difficult for them to detect hidden problems in  your system.

Often, software testing companies don’t have the technical know-how, experience or tools to back up their claims of being the best. As a result, they may overlook certain issues that can cause software implementation failure.

Software failure is critical  to any business. It can cause interruption of  business workflow, cause downtime or faulty transactions that can hurt your business. The Tech Republic reported that software failures caused an estimated loss of approximately $1.7 trillion in fiscal year 2017.

This is why it is necessary to make sure that the software testing service you choose has relevant technical experience. At the same time, you should check the company’s portfolio to gauge its performance in testing.

Adaptability

When you are looking for an outsourced QA testing service, you need to make sure that they are adepts at handling unexpected changes. Changing requirements, missing testing records, variations in testing plans, and management of regression errors can disrupt the entire workflow and make testing even harder.

Experienced testing companies use the latest automated procedures to deal with these issues. They also use their rich experience to take care of unforeseen problems and continue working in the  ever-changing atmosphere.

Don’t Be Attracted to Incredibly Low Rates

Several inexperienced software testing companies offer incredibly low rates to clients in hopes of luring them. While this may seems to be an attractive offer at first, you must remember that the reason for choosing an outsourcing testing service is to eliminate all bugs from the end product. Although such testing companies have exceedingly low service charges, there is no guarantee of their service quality.

Therefore, relying on a testing service provider with relatively low technical experience defeats the purpose of choosing an outsourced service. The initial lower cost will not benefit you in the long run when your project execution is delayed due to errors in the software. Instead, your overall costs will increase with time.

Evaluate Engagement Strategy

Before you decide to hire an outsourcing testing company, it’s essential to develop  your own business strategy and model. Both of these things need to be in-line with the outsourcing service you want. An outsourcing software testing company may provide its services in an incremental manner or collectively.

You need to evaluate your project needs and choose an engagement strategy that works in sync with your requirements. For instance, if your business needs to deliver software components incrementally to a client, then the application testing outsourcing must be down in the same manner.

Location of the Testing Team

Another important consideration is the location of the service provider. Check if the testing service operates in your region. Onshore companies are often costlier than offshore testing services due to the cheaper cost of labour abroad.

On the other hand, hiring an offshore testing service provider comes with its challenges, such as communication barriers due to the differences in time zones, cultures, and language. Therefore, you must consider all these things before outsourcing QA testing. You must ensure that your service vendor can overcome these problems easily.

Apply the Best Security Practices

Security is vital from a business standpoint. It is a critical factor to consider when choosing an outsourcing performance testing company. The company must implement the best practices and have comprehensive data security strategies in place.

Advantages of Outsourcing QA Services

Outsourcing QA service can help you reap the following benefits:

Less Effort Needed for Management

By opting for an external team for testing, you don’t need to invest your time and effort in hiring and training staff. Furthermore, when the testing phase starts, the testing team will not need your direct supervision to execute critical tasks.

Instead, the team will manage the testing procedure on their own and identify bugs independently. As a result, managers have more time to spend on other critical tasks. Therefore, they will be able to address customer requirements more comprehensively.

Efficient Workflow

If you try to merge the development and testing teams, it can be hard for them to detect problems and address them efficiently. If your development team has to bear the additional tasks of finding bugs, it will be more difficult for them to concentrate on their core competencies. As a result, overburdening programmers can lead to inefficient codes, thereby creating more bugs. Outsourcing application testing can get rid of this problem and make the testing procedure more efficient.

Lower Infrastructure Costs

To set up a complete software testing environment, you need to invest a significant amount in infrastructure. The capital investment of buying hardware and software testing tools can increase the overall cost of the project and make it less profitable. On the other hand, a software testing outsourcing company incurs no such costs. The external team already has all the tools needed to perform thorough software testing.

Fewer Conflicts in Internal Teams

Testing can be a source of conflict between teams, especially if developers have to make changes continually to their codes. If this happens within your in-house team, it can lead to internal conflicts. Outsourcing testing services can help resolve this issue as they point out critical problems more accurately and have an added benefit of working independently.

Business Assurance

The success of your business can be heavily influenced by the technologies you use for your projects. Therefore, it is essential for companies to make most of the latest tools available in the market.

However, incorporating new tools means bearing additional costs. Not to mention, keeping up with the changing technology can be difficult. Choosing an outsourcing company makes it easier to make the most out of cutting-edge technologies and adopt an effective testing approach.

Difference Between In-House and Outsourcing Testing

The main difference between in-house and outsourcing testing is significant. In-house development incurs significantly greater expenses due to infrastructure, operational, and HR costs. If your in-house professionals are inexperienced and don’t have the relevant knowledge to take care of unforeseen issues during testing, they will take more time to understand problems and expend more resources in resolving them. Furthermore, the process of hiring these professionals can take a lot of time and delay the testing procedure considerably.

An outsourced testing service excels in terms of expertise, as well. Their technical experience in multiple fields enables them to resolve problems more efficiently and in less time. Furthermore, their knowledge in various fields can ensure software quality and meet your expectations.

Unless software testing is a core competency of your company, it can be a huge challenge for your company to perform it correctly in-house. Instead of solving the problem, your staff can create more problems because of their lack of knowledge in software testing practices. Therefore, it is better for your business to outsource software testing.

Choosing an outsourced software testing service can help make your end product more competitive and ultimately drive additional customers. With that said, you should only consider outsourcing a software testing company that has relevant technical expertise and experience.

What Your Business Should Do before Starting Outsourcing Software Testing

While software testing outsourcing is important, your organization must perform certain things before engaging with the testing service provider. This can help your organization make the testing procedure more efficient.

Mobilization

When you have finally selected a testing vendor, it’s necessary to clarify your goals with them. Therefore, you need to perform mobilization with the testing service. In this phase, your company will formulate a service contract, construct Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and develop Statement of Work (SoW).

By pursuing these steps, you can define the output you’re expecting from the outsourced testing service and make sure that your goals align with the goals of the testing service provider. You can also finalize your strategies for engagement, determine KPIs, and choose which type of testing you prefer.

This phase gives both the client and the service provider the chance to convey their interests and agree upon a shared procedure of action. Furthermore, it helps to build a strong, long-term relationship between both parties.

Appoint a Senior QA Manager

Although any outsourced testing service can easily manage the testing procedure on theirown, having an experienced QA manager on your team can optimize the testing procedure. The professional can overview the testing strategy, plans, bug, and test cases and mediate conflicts effectively.

Streamline Workflow

You and the outsourced testing service provider will use different factors, such as software requirements, the number of bugs detected and resolved, and the current and updated codebase, as points of reference.

Therefore, it is essential to clarify a number of things before the testing procedure begins. You must determine where the testing service will store information regarding all points of reference and how often they should update the information based on their evaluation.

Furthermore, you must also share which tools your development team is going to use. This may include the development environment, tools for code management, and software used for integration. Lastly, you should clarify which bug reporting features are most suitable for your company.

All  these steps can help you to streamline the development and testing process of the software. They can help formalize how your information is managed within your organization, thereby making it easier to resolve conflicts whenever they arise.

Ensure Complete Cooperation of Your Development Team

Balancing the development and testing of software is a challenge in any software development environment. However, when appointing an external team for testing, the chances of disagreements and conflicts are even higher between the testing and development teams.

Even if that is not the case, development teams are often reluctant to communicate openly with the testing team. While the presence of a senior QA manager can improve the situation considerably, you also need to motivate your development team to cooperate with the testing team and convey their reservations openly.

Outsourcing Software Testing Team in PFLB

Small problems in software structure and design can cause significant issues in its application. Several obstacles, which include delayed response time, poor usability and downtime can cause significant losses to a business.

To prevent such problems from affecting your business, you need to consider outsourcing software testing to a team that can detect all core issues in the early phases and ensure that no error remains after the software deployment.

PFLB is one of the pioneer software testing service providers in the industry. Since its inception, the company has been providing software-testing services to over 500 companies across all domains, from finance and healthcare to retail and technology. The company provides its clients with core e-commerce web testing services, ranging from reliable Performance Testing, Usability Testing, and Mobile Testing to Integration Testing, Test Automation, and much more.