If an organization wants to achieve success within its industry or vertical, it must put out high-quality, reliable, and reputable products and services for its customers.
In the world of technology, especially software development, this is even more true. The only way for companies to guarantee that they release the highest quality, most effective software products is through quality assurance during the development process.
Quality assurance helps identify weaknesses, problems, and bugs during the development of software products with real-time implementation of mitigation methods. This process may sound redundant to the testing phase of software, but it’s a bit different.
While testing focuses on the specific product at-hand during the project, quality assurance occurs throughout the entire development process and strives to find solutions for long-term, proactive fixes to implement beyond a single project.
Software development isn’t an easy process. From gathering requirements and deciding on a development methodology to defining project scope, budget, and timeline, it’s difficult to keep a project on-track in today’s ever-changing technology landscape. In addition to these challenges, in-house IT teams must also deal with managing multiple projects at once, maintenance, and updates, as well as any other core business functions they are responsible for.
As development projects near their delivery dates and timelines shorten, quality assurance is one of the first areas to have their time cut down – even though it’s arguably one of the most important steps in development. For this reason and many more, it’s common for companies to partner with a third-party QA outsourcing team.
Why Choose to Outsource Quality Assurance?
There are many benefits that come with outsourcing quality assurance to a third-party team. With so much at stake during the development of a software product, it’s important to guarantee that it will go to market in the best state possible.
The additional benefits of outsourced quality assurance include:
Save Time and Money – Money is one of the major factors that organizations consider when outsourcing any kind of service, as they have to focus on the bottom line. However, outsourcing is a great way to reduce the bottom line cost itself.
When choosing to outsource, organizations don’t have to worry about the expensive and time-consuming process of recruiting, interviewing, training, and eventually hiring a team of quality assurance professionals. They also don’t have to pay expensive individual salaries, benefits, health insurance, vacations, and so on. Outsourcing allows organizations to need only to worry about paying one monthly or hourly rate for their quality assurance needs.
Outsourced quality assurance teams also help speed the process along. Comprising dedicated QA professionals plugged into the project from the start, these teams find bugs earlier in the development cycle, increase productivity, and help reduce time to market.
Better Overall Quality Assurance – It isn’t uncommon for professionals involved in the development of a software product to lose much-needed objectivity when it comes to the QA process. Assigning these tasks to an outside team instead helps companies achieve much more unbiased testing results.
Outsourcing quality assurance to a specialized company also means that organizations can leverage multiple or a team of highly competitive and capable experts of the nice. When compared to 1 or 2 quality assurance professionals hired as a part of an in-house team, this is a much more comprehensive and thorough option.
Scalability – Working with an outsourcing provider for quality assurance means that a company can scale its team as needed. When a project calls for more people to get the job done due to time constraints or many projects going on at once, organizations have the option to add additional QA professionals to their team.
On the flip side, should business slow down and there isn’t a need for as many employees as there once was, organizations can scale the team down to save money.
Delivery Under Strict Deadlines – Again, quality assurance is one of the first aspects of software development to have its time cut when a deadline is rapidly approaching. This leads to mediocre, bug-prone, and overall sub-par products put into the market, which then leads to a loss of reputation and revenue.
Outsourced quality assurance teams help expedite the QA process while still meeting project deadlines. This also relieves the in-house development team from having to worry about getting it done so that they can focus on the development aspect itself.
Focus on Core Competencies – Outsourcing quality assurance means that organizations have the ability to focus solely on their development work or core competencies of their business. They benefit from their products going through the specialized service that is quality assurance without needing to compromise elsewhere.
Quality assurance is a vital part of a successful development project, but many companies overlook its importance in the Software Development Life Cycle or shorten its allotted time. By outsourcing this process, organizations benefit by getting fresh, non-biased eyes on a project while saving time, money, and stress in the long-run.
About the Author
Malcom Ridgers is a tech expert at BairesDev specializing in the software outsourcing industry. He has access to the latest market news and has a keen eye for innovation and what’s next for technology businesses.
