QASource Blog

As companies work to release new features and focus on marketing strategy, QA testing might fall a few spots on the priority list. But overlooking QA can negatively affect the product in many ways. Post-release bugs, security vulnerabilities and poor UX are just several consequences of bad testing. A consistently poor product can lead to lost customers, bad PR and a drop in revenue.

When companies are trying to run lean - increase efficiency and cut costs - they look for every opportunity to optimize the way teams work and produce. Though IT services have been outsourced for decades, many companies are still skeptical about outsourcing their QA services. Many decision makers still think of outsourced QA as “throwing it over the wall,” with limited interaction and collaboration between teams and deliverables that may or may not come back per the requirements. But there are plenty of reasons to believe in QA outsourcing. It helps product companies deliver high-quality products without breaking the budget, allows larger teams to scale resources up or down as needed, and frees up development teams to focus on value-adding features. (Click to tweet)

The Agile method is a development methodology that depends on fast iteration and close collaboration among dev and QA teams. Historically, people have viewed outsourced QA as incompatible with Agile, emphasizing the misconception that teams need to be under the same roof in order to effectively communicate and reach alignment on project requirements. This view is drawn straight from the Agile manifesto: “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is a face-to-face conversation.” But with advances in technology come great shifts in thinking, and people are realizing that dev and QA need not be housed in the same building — much less the same country or continent.

Product companies have it hard these days. From established organizations to scrappy startups, everyone’s focused on trimming the fat and running lean. This puts the onus on Dev and QA managers to deliver innovative, high-quality products using a constricted budget and limited resources. In turn, today’s recruiting process is about getting a lot of bang for a little buck.

You know the old saying: “The customer is always right.” Turns out that it’s true across industries — from service and retail, to IT and software QA. Product companies work hard to deliver features that delight their customers, and software QA providers do their best to ensure that the quality of these features is high before shipment. At the end of the day, we all work in service of the customer.

From the early robotics of the 1950s to the advanced, algorithm-driven machine learning of today, AI has come a long way in a short amount of time. Though AI is still relatively young, QASource has found that AI's current and potential value to automated testing is massive. With the increasing complexity of applications, the lightning-fast speed of the software development lifecycle, and the highly competitive time to market across industries, engineers will take all the help they can get, whether it be from machines or other humans. So, why exactly is AI beneficial to automated testing services? Put simply, it allows the machine to learn and understand environments, perform “intelligent” actions, and improve itself automatically.

In this expert series, we bring you the concepts that help to understand API testing and its tools/techniques used to perform so that you can employ the right kind of approach as per your testing requirements.

For years, India has been the go-to-destination for offshore QA. Many leading U.S.-based software testing companies, including QASource, have made India home to their testing facilities. In our latest infographic, QASource breaks down the top 6 reasons why outsourcing to India makes the best business sense.

Building out an effective dev organization requires a strategic, yet flexible approach to budgeting. As your company grows, you may need to quickly ramp up resources, or ramp down certain teams and shift them over to newly prioritized areas of the roadmap. This volatility can make planning the budget for any team within your organization challenging, but it is especially true for an outsourced team that must rapidly shift and shape to the changing needs of stakeholders, dev and QA managers, and the customer.