Our clients tell us they paid a lot of attention to company culture when they were comparing offshore QA companies. They were convinced, based on prior experience, that culture is the critical difference in companies that integrate successfully with the development team and consistently find critical bugs. No amount of tools, methodologies, nor bug reporting processes can overcome a weak company culture when outsourcing QA. Nor can these resources contribute as significantly as company culture to the motivation of the QA engineers doing the work.
Our prospective clients have the same concerns, which is why I am always asked how we do things at QASource. They are impressed when I show them our reporting structure, examples of our steps to reproduce bugs, or our communication practices. But I am also quick to add that this is not what sets us apart as a company. What sets us apart is our culture of respect, quality, mutual growth, and success for all. Combining this culture with our expertise and best practices is what results in the highest quality QA.
Here’s a quick overview of our culture, which we call the “QASource Way”:
- All we do is QA and QA is what we do best. We eat it, drink it, sleep it; it is in our DNA. Our engineers are driven to find bugs, and they are good at it.
- Constant training and access to QASource’s Advanced Technology research group allows engineers to grow not only technically, but also in the areas of project and meeting management, client interaction, communication, leadership, and more.
- Ownership is vital. Each engineer is part of a team devoted to a single client, where employees see the direct results of their work and client satisfaction, and thus experience high morale. This further increases their desire to “work smarter” and be more productive.
- Engineers are eager to prove their value to their team and to leadership, largely in part to our targeted performance metrics and promote-from-within policy.
- We give our people meaningful, interesting work. Most of our clients have challenging QA needs beyond black-box testing. This approach leads to high employee retention and better product knowledge on long-term projects.
- We attract the most talented and skilled workers because of our culture and high profile clients. Most of our new hires come from the top 5% of graduates from BTES, a post-college training institute owned by our company.
- We reward the highest standards, which creates an atmosphere where engineers are expected to deliver according to those high standards.
- Our “tell it like is” policy opens up communication among all employees, whether an executive, trainee, or a client. We communicate goals more easily and resolve issues more quickly.
- QASource measures specific behaviors and deliverables that focus on delivering value to our clients and ensuring success for all stakeholders.
- QASource believes engineers are engineers no matter what part of the world they are in. We all think like engineers and respect engineers.
- We believe that cared-for employees are more productive. We provide meals and transportation to engineers who stay late. You will rarely see an engineer working the night shift.
Culture is not just about policies and value systems, it is about every day interactions, leadership metrics, and conscious approaches to employees, clients, and QA. We all know that great cultures result in better productivity, talent attraction, talent retention, and better quality work. We never stop searching for new ways to create a “great” company culture.
Learn more about QASource Values here.