The All-in-One Guide to Outsource Software Testing

Outsourced software testing services refer to the complete range of solutions where a company outsources or contracts the testing of their applications and software to an independent third-party testing team/company.

There are several factors you must consider before choosing to outsource software testing. These include the type of deadlines in your pipeline, how skilled your team is in QA, what type of projects you’re dealing with, and whether you need a fresh perspective to carry out your software testing better. If you’re dealing with short-term projects with an urgent deadline and your QA team is inexperienced, you will probably need to outsource software testing to stay on track and develop your solution efficiently.

Outsourcing software testing helps companies save time and money by completely handing off the QA process to an expert testing team who understands its business objectives and gets the testing done. In contrast, your company can channel its resources elsewhere else. Hence, it helps the company remain agile and expedite its software development and time to market.

Depending on your specific business needs, there are three software testing outsourcing models to choose from - onshore, offshore, and nearshore. Onshore outsourcing is where you outsource the software testing to an external company located in the same country but not necessarily in the same city as yours. Contrarily, offshore outsourcing is where you hand off the testing to a company located in another country, even halfway across the world, which works virtually with you. In nearshore outsourcing, you’d be employing an external team in a neighboring country, typically having a 3-hour time zone difference.

Software testing is mainly conducted to identify bugs in software and prevent them during the development lifecycle. Other software testing purposes include enhancing the software product’s quality, verifying customer satisfaction, ensuring the product’s reliability, and risk management.

Outsourcing software testing costs usually vary depending on what model and company you outsource your project to. However, industry standards suggest that outsourcing QA can cost 15-25% of the total project expenditure.