Innately, with a long-term business relationship, your QA team should become more efficient in testing just by the mere experience with your product and team. Over time, the testers get more comfortable with your product features. You and your testers learn the best modes of communication. Your experience enables you to focus on the most efficient processes for receiving and fixing bugs. Like any team, outsourced or in-house, management, development, and QA together build an efficient product development process through experience and adaptability. But that is not all you should expect.
Aside from business efficiencies, there are a number of areas to look at in order to see extra value from your QA team. Hopefully, your team is constantly improving and wants to give you all the value they can possibly give, but if they don’t, you should request it. This extra value can come in the form of added efficiencies over time, new ways of testing, or additional services. Many of these valuable services can be expected just from being a loyal customer, although they might be overlooked by both you and your QA testing team.
Here are five things you can consider:
- Reduced Test Cases:
The first thing to look at is the number of test cases that your team has developed. If you’ve been working with your team for a long time, that number is probably large. Your offshore QA team can reduce your test case count by making them more scenario-based. Reduced number of test cases results in reduced execution time. - New Automation:
Additional automation is not a new concept and can be another big opportunity for extra value. After analyzing your application and test-script maintenance, you might find new areas for potential automation, both for purposes of optimization and quality. There may be time and work upfront, but if there are scripts that can be automated throughout your product development, launch, and updates, it could be a huge time-saver. - More Efficient Automation:
Many people are satisfied with just getting some scripts automated. We are not. Two ways to get more out of your automation are (1) make it more robust and (2) make it more modular. More robust and modular automation frameworks allow the QA team to meet future requirements and additions with fewer changes. This saves time in the long-term and enables your builds to go-to-market faster. - Expertise Improvements:
Most offshore QA providers have a level of qa expertise, whether in your product, industry, or domain. That’s probably one reason you hired them in the first place. Make sure you keep getting value from their expertise. How is your team making sure that their testing efforts are in line with all the latest information? What are they doing to ensure they continue to have expertise in your product, industry, and domain? Get updates and request they not only use that information in their testing efforts but that they share it with you. They might learn of a new regulation required in your healthcare application to focus more testing on or that the new update of the iPhone now requires a change to certain test scripts for your mobile app. This information can go a long way - Competitor Comparisons:
Your team can go beyond just performing different types of testing. One way might be to put up a comparison report of the competitor products and list features of other projects compared to your product. If it’s not a competitor comparison, maybe it is some other form of information like industry statistics or new trends.
As your relationship builds with your team, it is only natural to expect added efficiencies. In order to realize this, you often must ask for it. If you have the opportunity early on in the relationship, you can make clear expectations upfront. If you have been partners for years, you can still ask your team to start measuring efficiencies or get them to periodically audit your project’s technical deliveries in order to find the risks and improvements in testing efficiencies and delivery processes.
Are there other efficiencies or value that you wish you were getting from your QA team? Tell us in the comments below.
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