QA Outsourcing 101: Why and Where

Every tech-company has the same goal of delivering an exceptional product with the greatest features, as fast as possible. To achieve that ultimate goal, a comprehensive chain of human resources must be built, in which the QA team is part of. Having an effective QA team is similar to having a capable bodyguard: a hazard detector, a guarantee to your life security. Take it more detail, QA is all about meeting the needs and expectations of customers with respect to functionality, design, reliability, durability, and price of the product. It is one hell of one’s work scope, therefore, partly evidencing the importance of QA in the software development life cycle.

• Read more: Differences between QA and QC in Software Testing

However, constructing an ideal QA team is not a piece of cake. There are lots of factors shall be considered at hand, such as whether to recruit in-house professionals or to outsource from another talent pool. Each has its own perks, thus, QA outsourcing is not a bad choice as well.
But why should we outsource QAs exactly? And where are the best addresses for QA outsourcing?

Why choose QA Outsourcing services?

Because it is beneficial in many ways!

Cost efficiency

Cost is often the top of mind when mentioning outsource. The cost of “borrowing” is often times lower than actually “buying” something. That is to say, hiring talents from outsourcing companies is often way cheaper than a self-recruitment.
When it comes to conducting recruitment, especially long-run, specialised ones that aim at attracting professionals and experts, one hell of a budget shall be taken out from the company account, covering bonus for HR executives, headhunters if any, commission for intermediaries, interview expenditures, etc.
Then let’s assume you successfully self-recruit a gifted, capable QA team. What’s next? You have to pay them, hourly, weekly or monthly. No matter when you feel like to “salary” your employees, you still have to open your wallet. At the very least, you must suffer QAs’ salaries and wages expense in accordance with the contract signed, the income taxes, the cost of their benefits package and their payroll taxes such as FICA taxes. That’s not to mention the expense levy on training and development.
Now make a calculation. How much you must spend for an in-house QA team? I bet it must be a big fat number of dollars, without a shadow of a doubt.
That, as a result, paves a way for outsourcing, a more economical way to pertain the capacity of the QAs without sparing way too much money. All you have to do is to sign a contract with an outsourcing company at will, that’s not to mention there might be various packages for you to choose. Even if you go for the highest-priced package, chances are it’s still cheaper than the cost of hiring QAs of the same level on your own. Hence, labour costs are optimised to the lowest possible.
Moreover, by outsourcing, you can let the outsourced staffs work in their office instead of yours. Therefore, you don’t struggle to collect extra money for office expansion or simply save the space for better purposes.
Plus, once a partnership is formed, mutual support shall come into play. You can receive management assistance from your outsourcing partner on QA team members controlling and administrative tasks, thus, together you both take steps closer to the goal. This way, not only your overheads but also your managers could feel a little relaxed literally.

Expertise

First, there is one thing I think you and me both agree: expertise is very important in QA processing.
Experts play a crucial role in leading the whole team to go the right way. They are ones that watch out any other QA in the team and make sure that they are all held skilful and accountable. They have the experiences and the knowledge to help PM and your company with that. Without them, a QA team is likely to go into chaos.
The question then is, how do you plan to recruit them?
Now let’s slip back to the hypothesis up there, about you self-recruiting your own ideal QA team. All those dollars aside, you are seeing your HR team doing a CV/portfolio scanning and interviewing. They might be doing it with decent support from a project manager, a CTO, a guy that takes charge of some IT cool stuff, or you. A list of expectations, requirements and benefits shall be handed to the HR department so that they have a foundation on the qualified candidates and are able to determine who is going to be short-listed as well as who will be the finals to survive.
If you are searching for experts, specialists or someone that is close to such levels, your expectations must be high, the requirements shall be demanding, and the benefits could be extremely lucrative. Yet, all of them must set based on the quality of the talent pool you are approaching.
In short, there are 3 factors affecting the expertise of your recruited: the criteria (expectations, requirements), the benefits you offer and the talent pool. Besides, the first two are often in a reciprocal relationship with the last one.

The criteria and the talent pool

While you’re doing recruitment, you are heavily attached to the company image and values. It is reflected in your expectations, in your requirements and any other criteria you set on the candidates. You and your own business values are the two things that can hardly be separated.
I won’t say it’s not right since you apparently have valid reasons to find people that match. No one gets to choose the persons they feel like they can hardly get along right?
However, the thing is although you need a great fit, you cannot ignore the competency.
Put it simply, though you want expertise, suitability can’t help but be a complementary one. Therefore, your criteria must cover both the suitability and the high-level proficiency (as you are looking for experts), which makes the criteria pretty demanding as I once said in the previous passage. Therefore, it forms a negative correlation with the possibility of successful expert recruitment: the more challenging the criteria, the harder you recruit successfully.
Still, it’s not a problem if you have a high-quality talent pool. If you are looking for the best employees, you should look into the best hubs. The criteria you set shall be in harmony with the talent pool you are going to access to, no matter what.
Therefore, if you are confident in the financial power to hire headhunters from HR companies, or in your company’s capability to create a high-quality talent pool that can provide the best QA experts, it’s cool. Just go for it. However, if you are nowhere near that confidence, QA outsourcing remains a better choice.
Outsourcing companies may not have a big, diverse talent pool as HR companies, but they are sure to have numerous reputable and experienced experts in the IT field, including QA experts. Because such companies give humans for hire in return of money, they have a special, distinctive, highly effective and reliable method of filtering talents, keeping only those who are capable of making wonders out from scratch and offer them to business customers.
Just connecting to an outsourcing firm and you are free to access their talent pool easily with a reasonable service expense without costing you any additional training or increased management cost. You are free to choose whoever you think meeting your criteria without having to think too much about the method to access a quality talent pool as well as the accord between two of them.
This way, you keep your demanding criteria over the level of suitability and expertise, yet you still have what you want in a much easier way.

The benefits and the talent pool

This is quite similar to the cost category. If you want experts to enter the game, logically you must be attractive enough to them – which is often shown through the number of benefits (salaries, incentive, insurance, etc). However, benefits are just a different name for money. The greater the benefits, the more money they cost you. This would add even more expense to the recruitment as well as the whole project budget in the end.
However, once again, if you outsource QA experts, the cost is cut down to an acceptable amount for the reasons stated above. You can save the money for other operational activities in the future, or prepare for the force majeure you might later confront.

Where provide QA Outsourcing services?

Although QA outsourcing seems like a good choice, it makes no sense if you make a terrible investment in bad outsourcing companies. Therefore, taking a heads-up on which companies are trustworthy and capable of making your wildest dreams into reality is never a waste.

ZS

ZS is considered one of the world’s largest IT service firms focused exclusively on helping companies improve overall performance and grow revenue and market share through end-to-end sales and marketing solutions—from customer insights and strategy to analytics, operations and technology. More than 4,500 ZS professionals in 22 offices worldwide draw on deep industry and domain expertise to deliver impact where it matters for clients across multiple industries. With rich experience in solving customer problems, ZS is a good partner for excellence indeed.

Infosys BPM

Infosys BPM Ltd. is a business process management subsidiary of Infosys Ltd. (NYSE: INFY), set up in April 2002. Infosys BPM focuses on integrated end-to-end outsourcing and delivers transformational benefits to its clients through reduced costs, ongoing productivity improvements, and process re-engineering. Infosys BPM serves various industries, such as energy and utilities, financial services, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, media and entertainment, retail, logistics and telecommunications. It has been operating in many countries around the world, including India, Ireland, the United States, China, the Philippines, Australia, etc.

Savvycom

Vietnam might not be seen as a big guy in the technology game, but it is an on-the-rise, dynamic and potential market promising to boom in the near future. Savvycom, an IT service firm located in Hanoi, the heart of Vietnam, is a company that pertains to all those values Vietnam market is promising to deliver. It’s a leading Technology Consulting and Software Product Development Company providing services to customers in various industries such as Healthcare, Education, Fintech, E-commerce and Logistic & Supply Chain.
Through constant efforts to deliver robust IT solutions to customers, Savvycom has achieved so many milestones, such as being listed at the top of Top App Developers In Vietnam according to Clutch. With a vision to make the world a better place with world-beating apps, Savvycom is dedicated to creating only mobile and software applications that really contribute to the well-being of our community, therefore, gain lots of affections from both the community and the customers.
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