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
Sorry, my answer will sound like a promo of my services, but have a look. May be this is what you need.
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.
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.
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.
In my opinion, outsourcing qa testing services is a great idea. It brings new ideas and perspectives to the table.
Apart from the advantages of outsourcing, since you are already planning to outsource automation, here are my few ideas:
Try to make sure that automation and manual teams have the same business hours.
A few members of the manual team shall be assigned for knowledge transfer and any future test case doubts.
Since automation teams are provided with pre-written test cases, in-depth knowledge of the app is not required in the early stages.
However, the automation team should be aware of the basic app workflow to start with automation.
The automation team shall be provided with some time to execute already designed test scripts to get the idea of the framework and app workflow.
Make sure the automation team has already worked on similar technology and has knowledge of all the tools on which your framework is based on.
As a part of the QA Team in the USA, I think Outsourcing QA Testing needs is the best choice and play’s an important role as a game-changer for your business.
As per your needs and requirements, There are different types of Testing that need to cover
such as
1.Integration Testing
2.User-Experience Testing
3.Product Testing
4.Functionality Testing
To work on thses things it is necessary to have relevant experience and confidence too.
Let’s see why Outsourcing QA Testing Can Be a Game-Changer
1- Identify risks at an early stage development
2- Faster Testing Results
3- Implementing Modern Outsource QA Trends
4- Good security
5- Mechanization in QA process
I’ll be honest, I’ve had both positive and negative experiences with outsourcing QA to offshore teams.
In the positive scenario, i was the lead working day to day with the offshore team, their main focus was manual execution and writing the corresponding automated scripts, they were fully engaged in the wider testing activities and treated as part of the team.
In the negative scenario, the offshore team were treated as a completely separate entity, almost as a “body shop” to get more people running manual tests. They were literally given the scope of testing and requirements once dev had completed and were then berated if they missed anything. When I joined, we tried to change the attitude and treat them more as humans.
I think for me, it’s good to have that regular open communication channel with the outsourced team and work collaboratively with them where possible.
@samwebb - I’d like to ask you some questions. I believe these might help people to give you a better answer.
Do you want to outsource locally or do you want to offshore ? As you might know, outsourcing is giving the work to another company, whereas offshoring is giving the work to an overseas company. Sometimes outsourcing and offshoring are used interchangeably.
Why do you want to outsource? Per your questions, I guess that you want to outsource your automation work in the “short” term and then maybe hire full time automation engineers to continue the automation work. Is that true? Are there any more reasons for your desire to outsource?