The previous several years’ trends in the IT sector show that businesses are looking to benefit from outsourcing IT application development. There are countless instances of businesses outsourcing their needs for call centers, data centers, hardware purchases, system maintenance, help desks, and software development. Another area of IT that is being quickly outsourced is testing. Companies are contracting out the execution of test cases, the automation of test scripts, and the development of test cases to system integrators, independent contractors, and offshore-based businesses. While other businesses outsource testing tasks, some businesses outsource manual testing requirements.
Whatever the strategy, outsourcing a company’s testing requirements can work powerfully in that company’s advantage by reducing costs and producing trustworthy testing results. The advantages of outsourcing testing are examined in the sections that follow.
Temporary assignments
Some organizations have a demand for testing services that exceeds what the current testing staff can handle. Even with a huge testing staff, the organization might not have the resources or knowledge to take on ad hoc testing projects (ie a capacity test for measuring the response times for a new GUI, hardware component, or LAN). For test teams that are unable to support such efforts, hiring an outsourced company to address spikes or increases in demand for ad-hoc testing activities offers a workable alternative.
Automation is needed
Many businesses consider test technologies, including test automation, to be obscure and foreign. Even businesses that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on test tools still have trouble implementing them because they lack the appropriately skilled personnel. Sometimes the test tools are even inappropriate for the environment they were designed for. The inability of the testing team to adopt new technologies is another issue that frequently arises when test tool purchases are made. As a result, many businesses are forced to do their regression and functional tests by hand.
In contrast to these issues, outsourcing testing companies such as TestFort have access to a wide range of test tool licenses from many vendors and employ testers that are proficient in test automation. They are also aware of the types of tasks that may and should be automated. For reliable and repeatable test results, automation of business processes and test cases is essential.
Reduction of costs in all directions
It is expensive and time-consuming to hire testers on a full-time basis and provide them with training and corporate perks. Additionally, there are additional costs associated with hiring qualified testers. Outsourcing as a less expensive option should be seriously considered by businesses wanting to reduce costs. The cost of recruiting in-house testers is significantly higher than the cost of hiring a tester from an outsourcing company with specific experience in testing a given industry or with a specific test tool.
By providing testers and testing solutions at a fraction of the expense of hiring full-time testers, outsourcing companies reduce testing expenditures. Additionally, they have repositories and libraries of automated tests that may be used or recycled for different testing requirements, reducing the cost of diverse test automation operations.
Knowledge of special requirements
Companies occasionally have testing requirements that are greater than what the current testing team members can handle. If a corporation has testing needs for which its in-house test team is unable to offer test coverage, it should seek assistance from an outsourced company. Numerous outsourcing companies focus on testing needs from diverse sectors, including financial, healthcare, e-commerce, and online streaming, among others.
Thus, offshore-based companies might test characters and symbols from other languages. To ensure compliance with rules from organizations like the SEC, OSHA, EPA, and the IRS, some businesses hire specialists in government regulations.
Dependable and substantive results
Producing objective results is complicated by using application developers to create and write code for an application test. Developers have a conflict of interest when they are asked to discover their own flaws in their work. Even in organizations where the testing team and the development team are separate, development managers frequently discover that they have to put pressure on the team to approve a project quickly. If the test team reports occurrences that are apparent to the end user, problems later intensify.
Companies that are having trouble getting unbiased and trustworthy findings can turn to an outsourcing company for assistance. Because there is no conflict of interest, it may provide unbiased test results and execution logs. The independent services may prove invaluable to businesses in regulated industries or government projects that are frequently subject to severe and thorough audits.
The point to which a test manager can have faith in the outcomes his team came up with is another matter that merits examination. Inadvertently providing data from the execution phase during capacity testing by inexperienced testers could lead to incorrect defect classifications and inaccuracies in the test manager’s suggestions.
Lack of labor
Common issues include understaffed testing teams and testing initiatives that start too late in the software development cycle. The success of all testing tasks is endangered by these circumstances. Test teams with insufficient people are usually under pressure to finish a variety of activities, such as defect tracking, identifying test data, executing test scripts, and documenting test cases, in a short amount of time. In the later stages of the software lifecycle, other businesses make the attempt to implement a testing team made up of SMEs and the development team in the hopes of performing various testing jobs in an arbitrary amount of time.
A company can use outsourcing companies’ big workforce to achieve deadlines by leveraging their services. Due to the large number of clients they must serve, they have an offshore team of testers with many employees. If testing requires direct communication with SMEs, test managers, and end users, they frequently staff projects with local personnel. An outsourcing company’s services make it simple for organizations with understaffed test teams to temporarily or permanently increase their testing resources.
Working testing tools and consumables
Some software needs to be thoroughly tested for scalability across numerous environments and database backends. It is necessary to test additional applications in production settings that closely approximate the final setting. Building a proper test lab or getting all the facilities required could be expensive and challenging to manage. An outsourcing company can assist in overcoming the challenge of gathering tools and equipment to test a system under a variety of situations with various hardware, operating systems, and databases.
Companies looking to reduce testing expenses, receive independent testing results, enhance testing experience, and bolster their testing personnel may find that outsourcing testing jobs offers a number of advantages. Many businesses will turn to outsourcing testing jobs in order to gain a competitive advantage in light of the recent flurry of software outsourcing agreements. It is anticipated that the shift to outsourcing will continue and change how many organizations approach software testing.
