When Do You Need a Dedicated Software QA Company?

When to Hire a Software QA Provider

There is no growth without QA

In the early stages of software development, most development teams follow similar patterns. Development teams test the code written by developers. A product manager reviews the software to verify that all requirements were implemented correctly and that no major issues remain. Releases happen quickly, and issues are resolved after products have been released.

While this method works for small, new projects, it does not address issues regarding product scalability when the need for scalability arises.

The urgency of quick releases and increasing product complexity results in the creation of new versions of code as products grow. The length of cycles to develop new versions of code, the type of architecture of increased risk and the need to provide customers with a stable product across various geographic regions and different integrations create an ever-growing need to expand the focus on quality from developers to include all aspects of the organisation (Business Risk).

It is at this point that most organisations begin to ask the question:

Should we have a dedicated Software QA Provider?

In this blog, I will provide an answer to this question. Here are a few of the questions you will see answered:

• When in-house testing is not sufficient.
  
• The types of scenarios that dedicated Software QA Providers provide have a measurable return on investment (ROI).
  
• The difference between using freelance software QA test contractors and outsourcing to a dedicated Software QA Provider to complete your software testing.

The types of companies that have experienced the most significant benefits from dedicated Software QA Providers.

If you are a CTO or Product Owner, CEO, or Business Leader (in a tech company), then this blog is for you! Dedicated QA teams become part of your delivery process, making them more of a continuation of your company than Project-Based Testers or Crowd Testing Platforms.

Additionally, dedicated QA teams offer the following:

• Manual and Automated Testing
• Test Strategy and Coverage Planning
• Regression, Performance and Security Testing
• API, Microservice and Integrations Testing
• Continuous Testing as part of a CI/CD Pipeline

The main difference between dedicated QA teams is “ownership”. The dedicated QA team is not only executing test cases; they own the quality outcomes.

There are a number of indicators that you need a dedicated QA Company; however, the first sign is when your velocity to release slows down due to bugs.

Some of the symptoms of this are:

• Immediate hotfixes after production releases
• QA is becoming a bottleneck towards the end of sprints
• More time spent debugging than building
• Increasing numbers of rollback or freeze features

When teams rely on ad-hoc testing to validate the quality of an application, they only run quality checks when feature development is already completed. Any defects identified will result in extensive re-work just prior to release.

Dedicated QA teams address this issue by putting testing left during Sprint Planning, defining acceptance criteria prior to Dev completing, and running parallel test cycles rather than sequential test cycles. This method allows for greater stability in delivery schedules and reduces the need for re-work.

A second sign that dedicated QA teams are necessary is that an application’s architecture has evolved beyond the capacity for basic testing methodologies.

In today’s application environment, very few applications are built as monolithic entities. In fact, almost every developed application relies on CRUDful methods of testing.

Should your application have:

• Microservice Architectures
• Public API (like for external partners)
• SAAS Subscription Billing Systems
• Real Time Analytics Dashboards.

Then your testing should go below the surface level. Numerous organisations encounter issues with API agreement discrepancies; integration issues across several services, conflicting environments, and inadequate testing capabilities at the system level. Dedicated software QA companies offer a perspective on how to incorporate consistent, integrated testing, API security validation, and contract validation as part of your workflow. This is particularly important for teams that operate independently to produce releases.

Sign 3: You Are Gaining Users/Making Greater Use Of More Than One Type Of Platform

When a company is growing, they are increasing its risk associated with that growth.

Growth across:

• From web to mobile platforms
• From a singular geographical area to more than one location
• From one customer type to enterprise clients

Increases the number of potential failure points.

Because of this, many organisations begin to consider the following ideas:

• What is the approach to testing on multiple platforms?
• Who is responsible for the Localization/Multi-Language Testing process?
• How do we establish a performance baseline using actual user traffic?

The purpose of a dedicated QA team at this stage is to create a comprehensive and scalable testing strategy that will grow in conjunction with a product’s use, rather than creating a testing strategy as a reaction to an incident.

Sign 4: The Industry You Are In Is Regulated

Some Industries can not accept the risk of not having quality.

Regulated industries such as the Healthcare, FinTech, and Trading Platforms, will demand:

• An audit-ready creation of test artefacts
• Traceability between all requirements and associated test cases
• Consistent regression coverage to assure code is not broken
• To validate a product with respect to security and compliance.

In a regulated industry, QA is not optional; it is a governance requirement.

Companies that perform Compliance Testing will be experienced in how to align the testing strategy with the Regulatory Requirements of their Client.

There are three major categories that an organisation or company will choose from with respect to any building project: dedicated QA, freelancers and in-house resources.

When determining what to use to test your application, many organisations perform comparison shopping prior to choosing.

Freelancers are flexible, cost-effective, and ideal for short-term tasks.

However, they have challenges with:

• Long-term ownership
• Product context
• Process consistency

While it’s great to use them for testing specific occasions, they do not provide regular Quality Assurance.

Internal Quality Assurance

The benefit of internal Quality Assurance is proximity and control; however, there are disadvantages, including:

• Delays in hiring and onboarding
• Fixed costs
• Limited specialization
• Difficulty in scaling internal Quality Assurance to support numerous quick turnarounds (especially for niche areas like performance and security testing).

Dedicated Software Quality Assurance Company

Dedicated Quality Assurance individuals offer many of the same attributes as in-house and benefit from the following:

• Long-term ownership
• Ability to scale up or down as needed
• Access to expert-level specialization
• Predictable pricing

This is why startups and large companies typically look to dedicated Quality Assurance as they are growing or undergoing transformational phases in their businesses.

If you want to see the greatest impact of Dedicated Quality Assurance on your business, the best time to engage those services is when:

• You are committed to a weekly release cadence or are releasing products continuously
• You are focused on rapid feedback loops as part of your roadmap
• The customer experience is tied to how you will get paid
• The Engineering Teams are under pressure to deliver
• Your organisation is in the process of modernising a legacy System.

In this case, no longer is Quality Assurance a cost to your organisation, but it becomes an accelerator.

Automation and Artificial Intelligence utilisation in the QA process:

The QA function in today’s world has transitioned fromLeading dedicated software QA companies that spend considerable resources on heavy investments in:

• Frameworks for test automation that support both Web and mobile platforms
• API testing as well as API contract testing
• AI-driven analytics to optimise testing and help prioritise test cases
• Intelligent defect analysis and reporting capabilities.

This investment is critical because:

• Manual testing alone can’t increase your scale.
• Automation implemented without a well-designed test automation strategy or plan creates a debt of maintenance for your automation.
• AI can be used to reduce the number of tests that fail in the large volume of tests that you will run as a result of your automated testing.
• When evaluating a QA partner, the maturity of the automation process is one of the most important factors to consider when selecting a partner.

Cost Considerations: Is it Worth It to Hire Dedicated QA?

The most frequently asked question is:
How much will it cost to hire a dedicated software QA team?

Although there is a lot of variance in cost based on where you are located and the scope of the work, dedicated QA generally costs less than:

• Adding or expanding the In-house QA Department
• Costs associated with recovering from production incidents
• Cost associated with losing customers due to quality issues.

Most importantly, the cost of dedicated QA should be viewed with respect to the outcomes that will result from hiring dedicated QA:

• Reduced defect leakage
• Accelerated release cycles
• Reduced time spent on engineering rework or bug fixes
• Increased customer satisfaction

Most products in the growth phase will demonstrate a return on investment (ROI) within 1-3 release cycles post-engagement.

Final Thought: QA Should Be a Strategic Capability

The more appropriate question is not whether or not you need to have quality assurance (QA) as part of your software development process; every software product requires a QA function.

The real question is, at what point does QA become so important that it moves from being treated as a secondary function to becoming a strategic function for you?

Many companies will experience this transition when they grow, experience increasing complexity or encounter increasing customer expectations at a faster pace than their internal business processes are currently able to accommodate. As a result, when a company realises that it needs to place a greater emphasis on leveraging a dedicated software QA provider as a strategic partner, it is at that point that the company will cease to treat investing in dedicated QA as merely an expense that needs to be incurred and will begin to leverage this investment as a strategic partner.

Logiciel Solutions partners with engineering and product leadership teams who wish to achieve scale with velocity, through the utilisation of advanced techniques in QA (Quality Assurance) as well as build automation, CI/CD, and Engineering pipelines. If you are considering when to transition to a dedicated software QA partner, it may be sooner than you expect.

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