Benefits of Flexible Staffing When Outsourcing QA

The primary goal of every company is the same: deliver an exceptional product with the latest features, as fast as possible. CEOs and QA Managers strive to achieve this goal by staffing their QA teams with expert engineers. But what happens when the release cycle slows down or the in-house team lacks necessary domain knowledge?

Instead of bloating your QA budget with underutilized resources and expensive training, consider outsourcing QA. It allows you to retain top talent while providing plenty of flexibility in team management. Here are just a few key benefits:

1. You reduce QA costs and improve ROI

Rapid release cycles require lightning-fast ramp-up of your QA resources. Sometimes, you'll need to ramp-down just as fast. This slow down puts managers in a tough spot, because they have to retain resources that aren't being effectively used. Working with an outsourced QA partner allows you to hire on engineers as needed so that your team can grow or shrink depending on the project at hand. Your fixed costs become variable thanks to the flexibility of this custom cost structure.

2. You have years of test experience and domain expertise at your fingertips

Software testing strategy is not “one-size-fits-all”. Are you testing a product for use in a specific industry, such as health care or finance? You'll need engineers with a wealth of domain knowledge to ensure full compliance. Will you be pursuing automation testing for the first time? A team of experts will establish your framework and provide coaching to help make automation viable in the long term. Outsourcing QA to a trusted vendor guarantees that you have skilled engineers on hand when you need them, with no costly training or increased management overhead.

3. You free up onsite resources

For many companies QA is an afterthought. In some cases, developers may be doing basic testing along with their primary coding work. This approach can result in overworked engineers, slews of post-release bugs and a poor quality product – all causes of low morale and toxic culture. A dedicated QA team makes your product's quality a key priority, freeing up onsite engineers to focus on coding, project management, or sales and marketing tasks. A flexible offshore team can also provide support if QA engineers from your onsite team are needed on a different project.

4. You gain flexibility without sacrifing quality

Great QA depends on effective team extension. The right provider offers an expansive team of skilled engineers that are ready to learn your product and your onsite team's culture, including:

• Preferred methods of communication
• Meeting type and frequency (daily, weekly, monthly)
• Schedule for development and testing cycles
• Preferred tools, frameworks and environments

Team extension goes hand in hand with high staff retention, so it's likely that you'll work closely with your QA Manager or Lead over time and across different projects. This way, you always have an on-demand team that has a strong knowledge of your product, market and company culture.