What is the best testing to be distributed to an outsource team?

Testing Thoughts TestChat
#1

I am QA Manager of a small to mid sized company who is looking to outsource some QA work for the short to mid term future.

My general thinking is to contain myself(QA Manager) and the manual testers as the in house team. The manual testers have by far the greatest domain knowledge of our products and do a lot of explority testing which is a unique testing skill which is hard to document for an outsource team. The outsource team will then be brought in to contribute to our automation tests. They will add tests to our automation packs that have been previously built and use our testing framework. The automation testers will be given tests cases to automate and then investigate any issues that fail.

Does this sound like a feasible idea, what flaws could there possibly be?

If anyone has any good tips with dealing with outsourced QA teams that would be greatly appreciated

#2

Hi, Samuel!

Sorry, my answer will sound like a promo of my services, but have a look. May be this is what you need.

  1. Crowd source testing
    So, the main service I offer to you is crowd source testing: https://qaprovider.com
    We use it daily for test QAProvider service itself and other products developed by us (https://eye.qaprovider.com - for example we are in testing process with this tool now).
    You will get a team of 10-30 testers who will do daily checks for you. Just notify them when you have new tasks.
    Read feedback about our service, from my experience it is very useful. 10 people could find more bugs in a short time rather than 1 tester. Also they do a lot of improvements suggestions.
  2. We have our own automation tool https://ui.qaprovider.com that can be used for test automation purposes. It is not public yet, we are still developing it and testing with our projects internally.
    But I see that you need somebody for automation tasks with your testing framework. We can ask our testers about this, somebody can do this for you.

If you are interested in this please send me a message on max@qaprovider.com. I will give you more information.

Regards,
Max QAProvider

#3

Hi Samuel,

I think you have a sound approach as to differ between implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge - and automate the last bit. I have used Wardley maps to derive a similar test strategy. You can read this great piece about using Wardley maps and cynefin to identify your system under test:

There are at least two challenges with the approach. How does your in-house testers deal with not testing everything? … as they might have been previously, I explore this in my post: How Automation Affects the Business

Secondly consider to include the automation team in the “in-side” work flow. make them a part of your team, as to avoid the “over the wall” issues. Especially if in another time zone.

There might be more ideas for your i this thread: