Quality Assurance Outsourcing Strategies: Tips and Tricks

When outsourcing development, companies must find a partner who will help them build the highest quality products. However, maintaining the quality of work throughout development is essential, hence the importance of quality assurance outsourcing strategies.

Quality control services must always be thorough, whether carried out internally or with an outsourced team. Technology professionals must systematically check their products for bugs, preventing errors during production and ensuring customers receive the work they paid for.

Not all providers use specialized quality control outsourcing services and those that do need to have the correct strategies in place. When looking for the right outsourcing provider, companies should look for transparency. Good vendors should share their quality standards and have no problem including their requirements in the software development agreement.

In the end, a customer who successfully engages an outsourcing vendor with the right capabilities and practices will receive products that meet their own standards.

Understanding Quality Assurance in Software Outsourcing

Understanding is the first step in implementing a solid plan and testing process for businesses. Here we will take a closer look at what IT service outsourcing and quality control mean.

Quality control x testing

Although they are often used interchangeably, quality control and software testing are different concepts in terms of objectives and methods.

Quality control is a proactive process that involves preventing bugs throughout the software development lifecycle. Ensures that the development team will achieve and maintain the desired level of quality in its customers' products.

Quality control addresses a wide variety of management issues at all stages of product development. It covers checklists, design analysis, development techniques and methods employed from the pre-design phase to product testing and launch.

Because QA creates a means of regulating workflow and monitoring product integrity and consistency, it also helps improve the productivity of the development team. QA outsourcing strategies simplify tracking errors during development and ensure the team meets customer requirements.

Software testing involves detecting and fixing problems in the product's source code before delivering it to the customer. It also addresses overall product usability, performance, security, and compatibility, ensuring that the final product meets all customer specifications and requirements.

Depending on the development methodology implemented, testing may not occur at all stages of the development process because it only addresses issues with the product itself. QA engineers perform software testing in parallel with the development process or during a dedicated testing phase.

Main components of quality control

Quality control outsourcing strategies help suppliers mitigate risk, reducing the chances of making costly mistakes. Quality control outsourcing companies need to consider a few key components of the process to ensure customers receive the desired products:

• Requirements Analysis: QA professionals play an important role in analyzing software requirements. This helps them create tests tailored to the product. Having a broad view of requirements allows QA engineers to help prevent bugs from occurring before development even begins.
• Test Planning and Design: Based on their research, QA professionals create a test plan. It includes the software testing strategy, budget, deadlines and scope of testing. They also write test cases that define expected results at different stages so testers know what to look for.
• Testing and reporting: QA testing services perform API and UI level testing and submit any detected bugs into a defect tracking system. They often use test automation frameworks to run test scripts and generate reports.
• Regression testing: After the team verifies bug fixes, QA specialists test all functions to ensure they haven't missed any issues and that their fixes haven't affected any product functions.
• Release Testing : Once developers complete implementing all features and functionality, QA experts design modified test suites that cover the scope of the final build, before delivering the product to the customer.

Quality control strategies for outsourced software projects

To ensure a smooth process, companies should use the following strategies when outsourcing quality control services.

1. Selection and evaluation of suppliers

When you outsource quality assurance services, you are giving up some control over the software development process, which can be risky at any stage of the development lifecycle. This is why it is important to carefully evaluate and select each supplier, taking into consideration the comprehensive plan and procedures established.

Companies want their products to perform flawlessly and be resistant to bugs and security issues. They must evaluate various features of potential vendors. The key aspect to note is the collective knowledge and skill set of the QA team. Strong teams understand DevOps and Agile methodologies, have training in automated and manual testing, and use a wide variety of testing tools and techniques.

When looking to outsource quality assurance services, business leaders should learn more about the vendor's market reputation, security policies, and available resources. This can be done in a number of ways, including asking direct questions during the sales process.

2. Defining quality control requirements and goals

Defining quality control requirements and goals in advance is extremely important to avoid any miscommunication. At the same time, QA professionals must identify and prevent potential bugs in the requirements analysis phase.

The team can then establish a plan by understanding the customer's needs. To effectively set measurable quality and performance goals, companies must clearly define their expectations, find ways to communicate and set realistic goals that can lead them on the path to success.

3. Communication and Collaboration

Promoting open communication and collaboration between a company and its outsourcing provider is essential to achieving technology goals and long-term success. Clear communication ensures that both parties understand their respective roles and responsibilities, while collaboration is essential for working together to achieve desired results.

Good communication and collaboration involves sharing information, providing feedback, offering status updates, and working as a team to solve problems and overcome challenges. To achieve this, companies and their outsourcing providers must establish clear lines of communication that allow for regular check-ins such as email, Skype, Zoom or Slack.

4. Risk Management

While working with an outsourcing provider brings a wide range of benefits, it also comes with some risks . Companies entrust all development processes and confidential information to their suppliers and cannot underestimate the different commercial risks this entails.

Before entering into an outsourcing agreement, business leaders need to consider compliance, concentration, reputation, operational and legal issues that may arise. Only then should they start looking for an outsourcing partner who is equipped to handle them all.

Strong software development outsourcing companies have no problem implementing risk management frameworks to help identify, analyze, evaluate, monitor, review and address any potential risks that may arise at any time.

An adequate risk management agreement should include QA. Suppliers and companies must agree on quality standards and performance indicators. They clearly define the parameters that represent success and failure and detail what happens if the indicators are violated.

Monitoring and evaluating quality control performance

Companies should closely monitor the success of their quality control practices and reassess as necessary.

#1 Performance Metrics

Quality control professionals must meticulously plan and monitor the quality control process to achieve success. Using appropriate quality control performance metrics is the best way to achieve this. Monitoring and evaluating performance metrics helps you track performance over time. Some examples of quality control performance metrics include:

• Test reliability
• Escaped defects found
• Average time to detect
• Average time to repair

There are many other metrics to consider. Its relevance depends on the objectives and current status of the project. Some metrics help evaluate the quality of the software, while others evaluate the effectiveness of the QA team.

#2 Regular Reporting and Analysis

Quality control strategies involve regular reporting and analysis. A review is a process of analyzing your product to identify and fix any errors or vulnerabilities in the early stages of development, before they become problematic. It is also a way to ensure compliance with regulatory and industry standards before delivering the product to the customer.

By performing different reviews, quality control professionals create reports that track detected errors and use best practices during any audit. A quality control report not only helps identify gaps in the process and prevent recurring problems, but it also allows you to recognize a job well done.

#3 Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is also important for quality control. This is the process of updating and advancing a product or service by quickly finding and eliminating bugs without creating any other problems.

Continuous improvement helps to improve product characteristics, increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs related to production, processes, quality and administration. Several management disciplines drive continuous improvement, such as Total Quality Control, Kaizen, Six Sigma and ISO 9000 certification.

Quality control outsourcing strategies that follow a continuous improvement model typically use a plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle. This four-step quality assurance method involves:

• Plan: Identifying any opportunities and planning changes
• Do: Implementing change
• Verify: Analyzing the results of the change and determining whether it made a difference
• Act: Implement successful changes on a broader scale and continually evaluate results

Conclusion

Quality assurance testing is an important aspect of any software development process. Although commonly confused with testing practices, quality control helps ensure that teams produce high-quality products that meet the necessary standards demanded by their customers. Outsourcing is a great way for companies to access quality control professionals without having to hire in-house employees.

If you liked this article, be sure to check out some more articles about outsourcing.

• Leveraging the benefits of a multisourcing strategy in software outsourcing
• How to Manage Outsourced Software Development Teams Effectively
• The ultimate guide to outsourcing IT projects
• Leveraging Big Data to Boost Your Outsourcing Model

Common questions

Why is quality assurance important in software testing?

Quality assurance is important in software testing because it guarantees a high-quality final product. Quality control strategies allow the team to ensure that the software meets customer requirements as well as specified quality standards.

QA professionals operate at all stages of development, constantly checking reliability, functionality, usability and portability. Quality control measures also allow engineers to find and fix many bugs during the early stages of software development. This way, they spend less time and money repairing them in the long run.

As quality control helps outsourcing vendors provide high-quality products at affordable prices that follow industry standards, it ensures customer satisfaction and protects the outsourcing vendor's market reputation.

How can I ensure effective quality control outsourcing?

There are a few steps to follow when it comes to ensuring effective quality control outsourcing. The first step involves evaluating and selecting the right supplier, taking into account established quality assurance strategies.

Companies need to analyze the skills, knowledge and experience of the outsourced quality assurance team, research the supplier's market reputation, examine their security policies and ask about available quality control resources.

Another important step involves defining quality control requirements and goals in advance. Promoting good communication and collaboration is essential in a quality control outsourcing arrangement.

What are the key performance metrics for evaluating QA success when working with a QA outsourcing company?

There are several important performance metrics for evaluating quality control success when working with an outsourced quality control company.

Absolute QA testing metrics are absolute values ​​used to infer other derived metrics. Some of these include the number of test cases passed, the number of bugs identified, the actual number of testing hours, and the number of post-launch bugs detected.

Absolute metrics are often not enough to evaluate and quantify quality control success. QA-derived metrics are useful because they allow QA to look deeper into issues that may be hampering the pipeline.