H2: Is software testing outsourcing for everyone?

We all heard positive and negative reviews of outsourcing solutions. Apart from how capable outsourcing vendors are, in order to determine whether the “outsourcing” solution itself is a suitable option, there are things all businesses have to comb through as they consider outsourcing IT operations.

Offshore services are referred to by many different names. When businesses outsource some fractions of their operation, it is called outsourcing, crowdsourcing, out staffing, cloud solution, and else depending on where you look from. To be specific, offshore programming or offshore development services are something that involves remote teams programming for web systems, mobile applications, and any digital products. And it is what companies from SMEs to large enterprises, and government organizations, non-governmental organizations in various fields are taking advantage of for a number of reasons.

When should you outsource?

Any product manager or system manager has at least once encountered issues like manpower shortage for testing, specialized knowledge in software quality assurance, product performance, inflated cost after a number of iterations, security risk, and so on.

Unless it’s an already established organization with perfect resource allocation that has shipped numerous products, it is rare to find a team that is fully functioning. In various scenarios, instead of stretching internal resources, it is a smart choice to outsource part of operations or development work to third-party experts that specialize in the job you want to be done. That, in the long run, saves you half-done jobs, or unwanted hiring costs during downtime.

Advantages of outsourcing

• Better test coverage
• Cost efficiency with Pay-per-usage
• Impartial and autonomous results
• Access to best practices and the latest tools
• Improved time to market
• Minimized management efforts
• Saving skilled developers from manual testing

The list goes on.

But most importantly, when you outsource, they do everything they can to deliver the best output within the deadline, while internal teams can come up with excuses to delay integration, execute the partial tests and give you headaches. It sounds like a good idea to take advantage of experts whose job is sole to ensure quality and performance, which would allow your developers to focus on core development than time-consuming tests. But what is the downside?

Disadvantages of outsourcing

Of course, outsourcing comes with some disadvantages. And depending on how well you manage it, it could make or break your project.

For example,

• Confidentiality and security risks
• Lack of flexibility and contractual restrictions
• Management difficulties and communication overhead

Who Contributes in Offshore Operation?

Are you planning on entirely outsourcing a project or delegating some responsibilities? A dedicated offshore development center may be the best option in terms of control you would keep, knowledge accumulation, and cost performance.

Here we explain who you typically interact with from offshore teams and how to choose the right team.

Success Cases

SHIFT ASIA works with clients of all sizes and industries, and it is indeed exciting that our work enables teams around the world to gain confidence in their work, saving them from the trouble of testing!

Clients decide to work with a software testing vendor like us, and here are some examples of when the projects met their true needs.

Best scenarios to take advantage of outside resources:

• Can’t find an experienced QA engineer/tester to hire in-house
• Release frequency is not frequent and it’s not cost-effective to hire someone full-time
• Requirements are complex involving manual testing, DevOps, and automation that the in-house team can’t handle
• Unsure of internal resources having access to latest practices, and needs an update
• Unhappy with current product performance and needs the 3rd eye to verify

As the digital economy offers overwhelming diversity in technologies and techniques available, product development becomes more and more complex requiring specialists in development, CI/CD, security, quality assurance, UX, and other fields. Hope this helped you explore the opportunity of outsourcing software testing.

Please check out our portfolio and get in touch for more case studies.