Strategic Outsourcing: Top Tips to Ensure Outsourced Software Testing Brings Value for Business

In the highly-technological world with lots of new software being released, it takes solid QA testing to ensure your applications remain competitive. With more and more businesses realizing it, the demand for QA outsourcing is going up.

Delegating quality assurance tasks to specialized QA testing companies can deliver businesses a range of benefits. Some of the key objectives that can be reached through outsourcing testing are operational and performance improvements, as well as higher cost savings. However, these benefits are only real when the outsourcing process is well thought-through and structured.

As a QA company with vast experience, we know first-hand how a structured approach to outsourcing software testing can benefit a business. A good IT outsourcing strategy implies:

• Hiring an expert, independent vendor of QA services;
• Shaping a clear business and financial case as a baseline;
• Constructing well-structured QA testing methodology based on the business’s objectives and needs;
• Applying the specific discipline of the performance measure to make sure that the chosen provider really delivers the expected results.

Such a strategic outsourcing approach can help businesses get the most of outsourcing testing, realizing cost savings of 25% or more and ensuring higher testing quality and real business value. In this article, we are going to examine each element of the effective software testing outsourcing strategy separately to help you develop your own based on clear strategic outsourcing examples.

Hiring an Expert, Independent Vendor of QA Services

One of the biggest mistakes made by IT companies is finding outsourced business development and testing in a single vendor. From first sight, it may make sense to delegate QA tasks to the same provider who’s responsible for development. First of all, this provider already knows your business and product. Also, it may ease communication and leaves you with one less provider to manage.

However, entrusting both testing and development to the same vendor can bring along a number of issues as well. The main issue, in this case, can be a conflict of interest. After all, can you really be sure that the vendor will test his own software accurately and sophisticatedly enough if the provider believes it has already met all requirements?

With that being said, we can conclude that outsourcing QA to an independent provider is generally a better move in terms of strategy. Although contracting a single company to take care of both development and testing can save you some money on outsourced IT management, it is not likely to ensure the best value.

Clear Business and Financial Case as a Baseline

In many cases, QA outsourcing in strategic management has two key goals:

1. To cut the costs of maintaining a big in-house team of QA engineers;
2. To enable the in-house specialists to focus on other pressing issues, while an outsourced team can take care of basic testing matters.

To identify how to achieve cost reduction, it is vital to define a clear business/financial case for QA testing. An approach to your projects based on a predetermined business/financial case allows to find areas for improvement and ensure the achievement of the desired result within a budget and set timeframe. Besides, it allows detecting and mitigating risks in the long run.

In a nutshell, a business-driven outsourcing management approach is needed to help organizations measure the outcomes of outsourcing testing across four major areas:

• Time devoted to testing;
• The total cost of providing testing resources;
• Product’s time to market;
• Overall software quality.

Well-Structured Based on Business’s Objectives and Needs

One of the biggest benefits QA outsourcing brings is a possibility for businesses to benefit from the vast expertise of software QA company, accumulated over many years of applying the best testing practices that ensure the highest software quality, meanwhile decreasing the time to market.

However, most benefits can be gained from providers, who have experience in customizing testing processes to different business environments. To get the best outcomes, you need a vendor who can shape a business-driven testing methodology based on your organization’s exclusive needs and objectives.

That’s why, in many cases, it is better to opt for independent vendors of testing services rather than outsource QA to companies who offer testing as a part of a bundle of services. As a rule, companies that offer quality assurance services alone have a deeper sense of how to improve each client’s current processes and bring the expected results.

Ensuring Quality with the Help of the Discipline of Performance Measures

The discipline of outsourcing generally consists of four key elements: the choice of vendor, management of provider and contract, development of clear business cases, and adoption of structured processes. Applying these basic discipline measures enables businesses to ensure they are taking a more integrated approach to the use of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

In essence, the core goal of this is to monitor and assess testing performance and how it’s being improved with the help of outsourcing.

Implementing all the above-mentioned factors into your overall outsourcing strategy can help you ensure that outsourcing testing is delivering the highest value and brings the best results!