When you start a project, the software testing costs may frighten you off. According to Glassdoor, the average QA Engineer salary in the USA in 2024 was between $82K and $143K. So basically you need to find ways to optimize the testing budget. But how to cut costs without compromising on product quality?
In this article, we are going to explore what you should account for in your QA budget, QA testing rates, and ways to reduce the cost of software testing without decreasing your product quality standards.
What activities to account for when forming a QA budget?
One of the essential steps before starting the quality assurance process is to calculate its budget. It is vital to consider all the budget areas that impact the overall QA costs.
- Staff Hiring and Training
Before building a QA team, your company has to define what QA roles and responsibilities are required for a particular project and what software testing strategies to use for your product. After that, you need to find, hire, onboard, and train QA specialists with appropriate skills.
If you want to save the time and costs of creating an in-house QA team, consider accessing the software testing expertise by outsourcing QA to professionals. Do so, and you won’t need to waste your precious time and money on finding specialists with proper experience, onboarding, and training. Outsourcing companies can provide you with a full QA team that can be quickly expanded or downsized.
- Manual Testing
Even though the utilization of automated testing grows each year, you shouldn’t disregard the importance of manual QA testing. The budget for manual testing includes the QA Manual Tester’s salary, as well as a salary for the Test Analyst, who writes the instructions for software testing.
To cut the costs of testing, you should aim to use manual testing only for those features that can’t be automated. For instance, exploratory testing is conducted to investigate the user experience. In most cases, it doesn’t require writing scripts and relies on the intuition and creativity of a QA Tester.
- Automation Testing
When it comes to software testing cost estimation, automated testing may have benefits over the manual, since it is self-executed, runs consistently, and automatically generates detailed reports. Yet, scripts for automated tests still require time and effort to create.
To launch the automation testing, you need to define which QA processes can be automated to strike the right balance in manual vs automated testing. You need to hire an experienced QA Manager to determine the scope of work and an Automation Engineer to write the testing scripts to execute.
- QA Tools
While counting the software testing cost, it is crucial to consider the budget for the QA tools to set up a productive working environment for both manual and automated testing.
Since the manual testing process requires detailed planning and execution to succeed, your team might need to use the following manual testing tools:
- Test management tools (Jira, TestRail, PractiTest, TestCollab, etc.);
- Bug tracking tools (Jira, Trello, BaseCamp);
- Cross-Browser testing tools (Sauce Labs, Browser Shots, Browser Stack);
- API Testers (Soap UI, Postman, REST Assured);
- Screen captures (CloudApp, Skitch).
Some of them are free to use in a small team, which is advantageous for software testing in startups, but most are licensed and have a cost.
As for automation testing tools, it is important to choose frameworks and platforms with high performance, support for multiple scripting languages, and real-time reporting. Make sure that chosen tools provide better ROI (return on investment) and effectively replace the prior approach, which was used before.
- Updating Test Cases
As the software code of your product changes continuously, test cases need to be regularly updated to cover the newly implemented features. Otherwise, developers may often experience failed tests if they don’t update ones according to code modifications. It raises the cost of automation growth, decreasing the ROI.
Factors to Consider While Estimating your Project
- The required level of quality. The higher your software quality requirements are, the higher are your QA costs.
- Your previous testing results and benchmark industry data.
- The QA testing scope and types of software testing applied to your product (e.g., functional, performance, usability, etc.).
- Software testing metrics and KPIs for the QA team.
- Test environments and level of detail in the documentation. Some documents are critical so that the QA team can do its job, the other documents can result in overspending.
- Utilizing test automation and automation tools. This includes automating as many tests as possible, including integration, GUI, API, component, and unit tests.
- Assimilation or development of new tools, technology, processes, and techniques. If your QA process needs a complete restructuring to cover the business requirements or the adoption of new advanced technology, it may result in driving up your QA costs in the short term but would benefit your product in the future.
- Complex timing of component arrival and release schedule. Frequent releases are good, but they can add up to your budget: every release requires additional preparation work, and testing.
- The complexity of QA processes and technologies used in your product.
- Hiring, onboarding, and team maintenance.
How to Choose the Type of the QA Team?
Costs of software testing strongly depend on the approach the company chooses to set up the QA process. Some companies don’t have their own QA department and well-established QA process and alternatively, hire a single QA tester to check selected features or even delegate the testing activities to developers. At a glance, such a strategy seems to be cheaper from a short-term perspective. However, a lack of proper software testing processes and required expertise leads to a product quality decrease as well as possible financial losses. Risks of insufficient and too cheap testing may include product release delays, reputation damage, security issues, and potential troubles with investors.
Poor quality has a cost. Always keep in mind that fixing bugs is more expensive than preventing them. Software defects found before the product release (new coding, testing, or designing) are cheaper to fix, compared to external failure costs after users report troubles using your product (technical support overload, sales reductions, warranty claims, reputation damage, or even lawsuits). Moreover, QA activities should aim to build up a bug-free process and eliminate potential defects before they appear.
Get a quote for QA testing rates. Contact UTOR now!
That is why it is crucial to access the QA expertise and set up a proper QA process to prevent software defects rather than finding them. QA testing hourly rates depend on various factors, such as the experience and qualification of a QA expert, the required scope of work, and project deadlines.
In-house QA vs Outsourced Team
Let’s get a closer look at the pros and cons of outsourcing the QA services abroad compared to building an in-house team.
Advantages of having an in-house QA team:
- Your own corporate culture.
- Close collaboration between the QA testers and developers
- Growing expertise within your company.
- Better control of the whole testing process.
- Reduced risk of a confidential information breach.
Disadvantages of having an in-house QA team:
- Long hiring and onboarding process.
- High costs of maintaining an in-house QA team.
- Management challenges
- Considerable budget for QA tools.
Advantages of the QA outsourcing
- Saves time and budget for hiring, training, and managing an in-house QA team.
- Access to a broad range of skilled specialists and industry expertise.
- Fast team shrinking or expanding at different software testing stages.
- Access to the latest testing tools and technologies.
- You can focus on core business processes and improve your software features while a dedicated team handles the testing process.
Disadvantages of QA outsourcing
- Risk of a data breach, which can be avoided by signing an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) with the QA outsourcing company before passing any confidential data to them.
- Finding a trustworthy partner. Make sure to choose a recognized QA company with proven expertise and reviews. For instance, UTOR was named the top b2b company by Clutch analysts.
How to cut the QA costs?
- Develop a detailed testing strategy first. Define features to be tested primarily and aim to avoid unnecessary product testing if it doesn’t comply with quality requirements.
- Test as early as possible. Make sure to test the requirements to find the potential issues and get a higher ROI. Remember, fixing bugs in a release stage may cost you a lot more.
- Prioritize tasks. Depending on your project goals, software performance, and security-related issues might be more important than button layouts.
- Develop and test simultaneously. Don’t wait till all coding is finished.
- Use the latest tools. It is essential to provide your QA team with effective manual and automation tools to increase productivity.
- Automate as much as possible. But make sure you rewrite testing scripts according to new changes in the product.
- Optimize manual testing. It is cheaper in the short run and can be used in a wide variety of cases due to its flexibility, but can be less accurate and error-prone due to a human factor.
- Consider QA Audit. External expertise and a bird-eye view of your QA process may reveal the issues that were not visible before. Let’s take a closer look at how your company can benefit from accessing the industry expertise.
How QA audit can help to optimize your budget
Whether you have an in-house QA department or an outsourcing team, it is essential to have a clear vision of your QA process. A comprehensive QA Audit is aimed at optimizing your testing activities, and as a result:
- You will get the foundation for mature, streamlined, and scalable QA processes.
- Qualified experts will give you an understanding of what to test, which testing approaches to choose, and how to implement them in your workflow.
- The audit will identify risks in your QA process, and help you to build the risk mitigation strategy.
- Optimization of the QA process by locating its bottlenecks.
- You will get the general vision for long-term QA process improvements.
As a result, you won’t spend money on unnecessary software testing activities.
In addition to the mentioned benefits, at UTOR we provide you with a detailed action plan with quality improvement suggestions and a presentation with professional recommendations on how to improve the weaknesses and enhance the growth areas.
Conclusion
No matter how simple or complex your product is, you should never compromise on testing. Following the steps mentioned in this article will help you optimize your testing budget without putting your business at risk.
If you feel that your internal QA resources and expertise are not enough to reach your quality goals, consider consulting experts or expanding your team. Find an optimal solution for your business with UTOR.
