5 Reasons to hand your testing over to dedicated team

by Liudmyla Potyomkina | November 8, 2017 12:23 pm

The current market trends and tendencies require more complicated and sophisticated software products that will meet international standards. Besides, they should fully satisfy the needs and expectations of demanding end users. Nowadays, testing is an obligatory stage of every software development procedure. QA and testing[1] activities assist in ensuring positive user experience. But the question is who will perform testing: staff QAs within dev team or dedicated testing team?

As a price of mistakes is very high, everyone strives to minimize the risks of software failure by selecting a proper QA vendor. Due to objectiveness of quality evaluation, industry-specific experience, availability of testing means, independent testing[2] performed by dedicated QA team is rather in-demand service. Watch the webinar[3] to know the benefits of independent testing over in-house team.

Based on my experience in managing independent testing projects, I can single our five main reasons for our customers to select dedicated QA team[4].

Limited project budget

We all know that small projects and startups are rather limited in their expenses and very often they have to sacrifice one of the stages of software development. In the majority of cases, it is a testing stage. The projects with limited budget usually either skip testing or conduct it on their own stem, e.g., a development team or other staff members. In such a case, quality verification will not be proper as developers are aware of how a system should operate and they cannot provide an unbiased assessment. Other staff members can conduct only user testing or exploratory one. It can be resultative but only in detecting minor issues. You will not discover performance or security bugs in such a way.

Applying a cost-wise approach, companies are trying to reduce expenses and avoid the unnecessary ones, for example, spendings connected with staff augmentation. Hiring in-house QA specialists for short-time tasks is not a cost-efficient practice. Also, do not forget about the related spendings on searching a proper candidate among a large pool of specialists and checking his / her skills and knowledge. When people see an open QA position with required working experience, they will send you a CV even if they have no idea on testing and IT at all. Recruitment Manager and Technical Lead spend time on looking through a number of resumes and interviewing several persons who, as they hope, will satisfy the requirements. Besides, a company should ensure proper working conditions for new employees, e.g., working place, equipment and technologies required for testing and other necessary things. So now the idea of dedicated QA team seems very attractive, doesn’t it?

Lack of time

Close deadline is a nightmare of every company that produces software solutions or services. When you do not have enough time and when you are under constant pressure of upcoming deadline, you close your eyes on issues and punch items. Prays for a code to work and neglection of small mismatches can cause serious difficulties in future. Products not ready for release should never be pushed.

As the size of a dedicated QA team is variable, it can be easily adjusted to project needs. For example, an internal QA team of 2 specialists should conduct functional testing[5] of newly implemented feature and check a load capacity of online-store to ensure successful Christmas release. Besides, the team has limited time. Will you use the help of dedicated QA team?

Unavailable resources

A number of mobile devices and tablets of different OS types and versions is very high. Checking a software system on each gadget available at market will require much time and money as modern devices are rather expensive. Does your project budget cover such expenses? Applying to a dedicated QA team is a cost-wise approach. Why? Because independent testing is the main activity of QA companies and they have the majority of up-to-date technologies to provide the top-quality services. Apart from that, dedicated teams are aware of software specifics and have experience in testing of a particular type of software products, e.g., websites, e-commerce solutions, IoT (Internet of Things) products, cloud-based solutions, etc.

Also, the usage of emulation / simulation systems will not solve the problem of device absence. Verification of software quality on emulators will not show the real system behavior. It even may trigger issues that never appear in real conditions.

Focus on priorities

Having own management team, a dedicated QA team does not require additional expenses on time and resources. Besides, such a team already has a well-established strategy and working approaches. A customer should not bring up new specialists. The integration of dedicated QA team into development procedure enables the opportunity to focus on core activities and business aspects.

Fresh view

Being unaware of system operation properties and its expected behavior, dedicated QA team provides an objective quality evaluation based on project documentation and specification if available. Specialists provide a fresh view on product quality without any prejudices. Only accurate and exact evaluation. All detected bugs are reported in a bug tracking system. Besides, dedicated team evaluates the product quality from end-users’ perspective paying attention to usability. Due to experience in testing particular software types, QAs are aware of users’ preferences and expectations. So they are able to provide some recommendations for quality improvement.

Handing testing over to dedicated QA team provides the acceleration of development activities, reduction of expenses on test configuration, improvement of software quality based on its objective evaluation. To get more about advantages of dediacted QA team, watch our webinar[6].

Related Posts:

• How to stay optimistic and lead your company out of a crisis?[7]
• Game Software Testing: Cases for enhancing in-house team[8]
• Outsourcing, Outstaffing and Independent QA: What is the Difference?[9]

Source URL: https://blog.qatestlab.com/2017/11/08/dedicated-qa-team/

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