Today the market provides thousands of outsourcing software testing opportunities. Growing demand stimulates the emergence of new QA teams.
Outsourced Software Testing Market Report shows the rapid growth of the software testing market and predicts further increasing market size.
But how to choose a reliable QA team among hundreds of them?
UTOR has been providing QA outsourcing services for five years and has worked with 81 clients from 8 countries. During this time, we learned about the pain points of our clients when hiring a QA partner.
We even interviewed other market players to find out insights on how to choose the best QA company.
In this article, you will find our top tips to help you choose a reliable QA team.
What should you consider before choosing among several testing companies?
A company is involved in the business process
Many QAs are interested only in how software is supposed to work. Choose a QA team that asks a lot of questions about the business and its solutions. Members of the team should ask:
- Who is the target audience of the product?
- Which country is a target for a business?
- Which solutions bring a product for their customers?
- What do you expect from the quality of the product?
The software testing company should be interested in which client problems they must solve. A professional QA team can identify software defects if end users do not use the product in the way the developers intended. The team must write test scripts according to business requirements.
Understanding of business allows QAs to plan and strategize the testing process. Professional QA teams can describe the next 3-55 steps to take on your project.
Consider the attitude of the selected team to new ideas and experiences. Are they interested only in money? Are they striving for a new experience and knowledge? Ask candidates about their past experience. What did they bring new to projects? Which specific approach did they find for a particular client’s needs?
The QA team could create frameworks, tools or provide unusual solutions for clients. They should be proactive and interested in finding solutions that are perfect for your business.
Check what other clients say about the QA company.
Feedbacks, reviews, or blog comments are useful sources of information for selecting companies. There are various websites that facilitate your research (Clutch, Goodfirms, etc). You can find negative comments from QA team clients and ask the team how they managed to fix their mistakes.
The QA team provides a Service Agreement Contract
The QA company and clients have to sign a contract. This document describes deadlines, quality measures, stages of a testing process, and so on. It makes collaboration between QA engineers and clients safe.
Before getting to work, the UTOR team and the client sign a contract. In the document, the QA team and the client consolidate their duties and project details, which were discussed earlier on regular calls.
Comprehensive experience and expertise.
You can require only mobile app testing or automation testing. However, bear in mind that you may need a broader range of services later. Choose a QA team that can provide various types of testing and work with different testing tools. Check their websites and portfolios to find out their experience with different types of projects.
The team worked on a project in your field
Every type of project differs from one another by specific requirements to quality, business goals, and system features.
So, the process of testing depends on the type of project. For example, testing a banking app includes testing techniques to ensure a high level of security, data integrity, and total coverage of business workflows.
The QA engineer should have expertise in your segment and can prove it by their portfolio. For successful testing, ensure that the QA team has worked with projects in your field.
The UTOR team is experienced in different business fields.
We successfully completed educational, digital marketing, fintech, SaaS, healthcare, and e-commerce types of projects.
Our QA engineers tested mobile (Android and iOS) and web platforms for different devices.
We provided software testing services for Israel, UK, Brazil, Ukraine, South Africa, the USA, Japan, and Germany.
Learn more about our projects.
Don’t hide additional costs
Firstly, qualified software testing engineers can not charge $8 per hour. Such a price can take unqualified QA engineers or newbies. Eventually, collaboration with unprofessional QAs affects the quality of the end-product.
Indeed, software testing is an expensive process. However, a business can lose much more money due to defects and bugs. The professional software testing process is an investment in the future.
Engineers thoroughly learn and check systems for finding potential and existing risks. It is a time-consuming and difficult task. Moreover, the price of software testing can increase. Software engineers can provide additional testing or buy new software testing tools.
The UTOR team minimizes monetary risks for your company. We provide pilot projects with a 50% discount. During the trial period, you can evaluate our engineers’ work, values, and corporate culture. It helps you to make the right decision.
More information about the pilot project you can read at the end of the article.
Easy and self-managed team
The main idea of outsourcing is transferring part of a development process to third-party hands to provide a client with the opportunity to focus on the main goals.
Thus, it’s important if a vendor team manages the whole process from writing documentation to controlling the testing software process during development. You, as a client, should not be a babysitter for your outsourcing team. Control, management, and observing of the QA team are tasks for the vendor company.
Instead, you can focus on the primary goals of your company. The vendor should provide a QA manager who adjusts communication between the client and the outsourcing team.
By hiring UTOR engineers, you will get the whole QA team that guards your product quality.
Transparent communication
Different time zones and team locations can be a barrier to transparent communication. Choose the team that can efficiently communicate despite difficulties and provides quick feedback. The QA team should make a meeting schedule with clients.
Communication during calls should be comfortable and effective. QAs should ask about the main business and client problems in detail. After that, they provide solutions and describe how they plan to manage difficulties.
Pay attention to how QAs answer your questions: answer clear, detailed, and accurate? or they parry questions, evade, and give dishonest answers. Grammar and literacy are also important as it shows both their level of education and respect for you.
The UTOR team knows how to establish communication. We have been working remotely for over five years. During this time, we have built effective communication with clients from all over the world.
There are some feedbacks from our clients about communication:
Most of our communication goes through project manager Alex. He is an incredibly smart, connected, and action-oriented projected manager. He is always on top of things. We have weekly calls to discuss the progress and news tasks. – Max Sereda, CEO, Grand Time
The QA team can write both tests and business cases
Writing test cases to cover different aspects of the system is a direct duty of QAs. However, professional QAs know how to write business cases too. Software testing is an expensive process. With implementing automation, costs are drastically increasing.
So, QA engineers should write business cases to provide evidence of software testing use and effectiveness. Business cases describe why a client should implement software testing and its financial value. It prevents wasting time and extra costs.
The team sets realistic expectations about testing results
QAs know what they can and cannot do clearly. The team should describe how to measure software testing success. The professional QA team can provide examples of detailed reports with a number of bugs, types of defects, retrospective notes. The most important is that the QA team should offer solutions for improving the product.
The UTOR team can solve all your QA problems and fears. We’ll ensure that your product is bug-free and hasn’t critical problems in each release.
We provide a one-week pilot project where our team audits your app. During the audit, our QA engineers:
- thoroughly learn and explore your product.
- define how to build or set up your QA process
- create a Quality Strategy on how to increase the quality of your app
- offer an Action Items Plan – a detailed document with solutions on improving app quality
Conclusion
There are a lot of risks when you decide to adopt QA outsourcing in your business model. However, a reliable QA partner combined with proper management can minimize pitfalls. We showed you our ten tips to choose the right QA partner. Do you want to know more? We are happy to consult you and reveal more information.
