- June 7, 2017
- Posted by: Abhay Das
- Category: Quality Engineering
Competent QA engineers with hands on experience, standard processes, unique QA methodology & best practices and cost are some of the significant parameters to consider, when looking for the most suitable Outsourced QA vendor.
Outsourced Software QA 2017 Global Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 10.8% and Forecast to 2021
What is Outsourced Software QA Services?
When software QA process is carried out by an independent company or a set of people, who act as an extended arm (to increase the current QA bandwidth) or build a dedicated team to accomplish QA goals from onshore/offshore/onsite/hybrid models is called outsourced software QA services.
Software QA is a crucial phase of software development life cycle, but most of the organisations see software QA as a non-core process in SDLC.
Hence, they will rely up on internal development to accomplish the QA tasks. Sometimes the internal QA team will also be very small and find challenges to handle some of the crucial testing activities.
The idea of outsourcing QA activities are initiated, when there are constraints with respect to skilled resources, time and cost.
QA Outsourcing empowers a business to concentrate on its core activities, whereas, the external software testing vendor takes care of the regression testing, maintenance of test scripts/cases, etc..
It offers business benefits including independent valuation, which improves the overall quality, reduces time to market, and minimizes OpEx & CapEx.
What are the expectations of an Outsourced QA vendors?
There are three key factors for selecting a software QA service vendor. They are
Competency
Software development businesses will first look at the competencies of the resource pool, provided by the independent software QA vendor.
The QA vendor should have a team comprising Certified Testers of various levels (ISTQB), managed by PMP certified project manager.
Sometimes, the QA team needs to be certified to perform certain game testing activities such as to test game consoles.
The software QA vendor should be an expert in understanding the concepts of the software as well as the related testing process or methodology, tools, platforms etc. Also, it is expected that the QA team members are adaptive and quick learners.
Knowledge
A prospective client should always check if their QA vendor is keeping pace with the latest trends and technologies.
QA vendors should be able to provide a right solution at right time also at an affordable cost.
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They should have a strategy to reuse their knowledge repository to cover all problem statements with a quick turnaround time. Some relevant case studies and client reference would help assess a QA vendor’s capability.
Infrastructure and Support
Last but not least. What will happen after the testing service? Are they providing on-going support and suggestions with the help of CoE.
The software QA vendor should provide test environment management system, testing tool management, cloud based test environment, test accelerators, jump start kits, VPN connection etc.
It is very important to have an excellent infrastructure for performing testing services.
A good software testing QA vendor should be able to UNDERSTAND, EVALUATE and IMPROVE the testing process.
Indium Software has been recognized as one of the top Outsourced QA vendors (Ref – Clutch.co). Indium Software team can provide reliable software testing services at all phases of the development cycle.