Nowadays, more and more companies and corporations from the IT sector are using employee outsourcing in their practice, and even entire firms, work remotely and provide their customers with a certain package of personalized services and offers.
Let’s look at these relationships through the prism of attracting a remote group of testers (QA specialists) to the project, who are supposed to check our product as productively and efficiently as possible and provide an exhaustive report that everything works, everything is in order and the customer will be completely satisfied.
But how satisfied and happy will we be? After all, sometimes such a form of relationship (at a distance) can become a catalyst for the emergence of a lot of risks and omissions, which in turn can lead to the collapse of the next release, or the entire assembly of the software being developed.
So first of all, you still need to understand how the qa outsourcing services live now and what are their positive aspects?
Why outsourcing is confused with outstaffing: similar realities
Indeed, it is very easy to get confused in the names and the designations behind them. Especially if the 2 concepts have very similar designations.
To discard misunderstandings, you can highlight the key characteristics of the two terms and put a kind of equal sign between the concepts.
Testing outsourcing – performing the tasks to check the health of the software. The outside contractor undertakes to perform all necessary work through the involvement of third-party resources.
Most notably, the testing outsourcing process usually remains behind the scenes and is not available to customers – the client receives the required result at the output.
Outstaffing testing is the process of providing personnel to enter a group of qualified employees in a certain area (QA, back-end, front-end and so on). Issues related to the placement and organization of work of such employees are resolved by the head of the company that hired them.
We figured it out, but now the main question is: how can the risks of a remote form of testing on the project be reduced? Where is the list of risks and shortcomings that may negatively affect the developing project or seriously delay its implementation?
But before talking about risks, it is necessary to highlight the factors why IT companies turn to the qa services of specialists working remotely.
Advantages of outsourcing
It’s always right to start with the good when you analyze something bad.
Competent distribution of functional load
Very often in the process of life of an IT company, there comes a phase of floating need in a certain group of employees. A striking example of such practice is the testing department, which can sit without work at all for a couple of weeks, but then go on a long voyage for a couple of months in search of the performance of the created product.
And it is outsourcing that allows you to competently control the workload of full-time employees. When the notorious “peak” load comes, it makes sense to attract a group of third-party testers to the project in order to quickly and most importantly qualitatively prepare the product for the final release, and not to pay salaries to employees who in moments of “silence” are not busy with anything at all.
Minimizing the cost of attracting new people
We can immediately say that the form of remote hiring of employees allows you to significantly save on the salary of a specialist, but there is also a group of non-obvious factors:
- Office rent;
- Purchase of the necessary equipment;
- Recruitment;
- Official registration of employees.
- It can also be noted that the above factors require not only monetary costs, but also temporary ones.
Look from the outside
Do not be surprised, because even the most professional and experienced team of web developers needs a fresh look from the outside, which will allow you to highlight the shortcomings of the product being developed.
Execution of a specific group of tasks
Sometimes it happens that large-scale releases and implementation of basic tasks lose control over the creation of the necessary reporting and technical documentation on the project. Over time, such omissions can lead to a decrease in working productivity.
It is possible to perform such work (for example, writing test cases for a typical product) that can be entrusted to a remote team of specialists.
