Outsourcing your software development needs has become somewhat of the norm, and for a good reason. Onthe forefront of the movement is the price cut – which can be about half of what in-house firms pay. But outsourcing comes with other benefits as well, and these benefits vary in their nature and magnitude depending on which aspect of the software development process you choose to outsource. Here we will focus on the reasons that outsourcing your Quality Assurance (QA needs) will benefit your company.
- Increasing objectiveness: Choosing to maintain the entire software development process in-house (or doing so by default) creates a natural conflict of interest. In checking for our own mistakes, there is a natural tendency to overlook them. In a sort of confirmation bias, humans can see the same mistake over and over again without catching it. And, in the field of software development, sometimes the only way to ensure that errors are detected is to treat the development process and the QA process as two separate entities. Often only with an objective eye looking at your software can you see these errors.
- Division of labor: The division of labor factor in QA testing is important. To ensure that your software is a hundred percent ready to go without any errors or bugs, you really want to have a trusted, dedicated QA team doing your testing, rather than having your in-house development team finish the final stages of the software development lifecycle. Even for models in which quality assurance is the last step, it is by no means less important than the others, and professional quality assurance testers should do it. In a bonus, you are easing your firm from the burden of this important process.
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- Testing the waters for higher stakes outsourcing: Maybe you haven’t begun outsourcing at all because you are still held back by some hesitations. Maybe you haven’t worked with contractors and aren’t sure how steady remote employment will be. Perhaps you’re hesitant about the communication with a company in another time zone that speaks another language. Or maybe you don’t want to put your firm at a security risk by handing your code over to external employment. In the case of all of these reluctances, outsourcing your QA testing is a great first step. It minimizes the risks of having problems with external contractors to a single department, and you don’t have to hand over your code.
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If you are on board and ready to outsource your QA testing, we want to go one step further and suggest that you outsource your QA testing from the beginning of the project. Rather than wait until the end, and incur large costs, extended wait times, and massive headaches, put a QA system into place where the problems exist - from the start.
Putting a system in order with a full-scale, dedicated, non-partisan QA testing team from the beginning is an investment that can save you time, money and stress. Unfortunately, this investment isn’t as visible when you error on the side of caution. Errors that don’t exist won’t be appreciated when you finish the project with a flawless product while, on the other hand, should you choose not to incorporate QA testing from the start, the flaws and bugs that are detected at the end will be readily apparent.
