3 Questions to Ask Yourself When Deciding to Outsource your QA or not

Quality Assurance (QA) is a heavy concern for any company that provides a digital service. The user experience can make or break the success of a company. The question is not whether a company should test their digital service or not, but how the company should go about it. The initial decision to be made is whether to outsource QA or not. Here are the questions to ask yourself to find the response:

1. Do I have the time?

For a website of 25 pages, it takes 100 hours, on average, to effectively test your website, and that’s after normal developing and initial checking is complete. You need to figure out if your team has the time to manage this kind of a project on top of their regular workload and if it is truly making the best use of their time.

2. Do I have the resources?

With a vast array of devices on the market, digital publishers usually test their product on 20 devices or more to make sure their user experience will be good for the majority of the population. This could make an influence on your decision if you do not have a wide variety of old and new devices.

Testing teams also need a bug tracking tool. A bug tracking tool is essential in making sure that your team is well organized so that you don’t miss any bugs that could put your user experience at risk. It will allow your team to find bugs, recreate bugs in order to fix them, and track their progress.

In certain cases, you may need an automation tool to automate your testing. As you know, sometimes when you make a change to one aspect of your digital service, it can create side effects in other parts of your digital service. Regression testing is repetitive testing that makes sure that your digital service doesn’t get corrupted by a bug. It is fastest and easiest to automate this process with an automation tool.

3. Do I have the expertise?

QA testing requires specific skills because your testing team needs to have a highly technical eye to hunt down bugs, and yet at the same time, must have a simple mind to be able to think like a normal user. It’s sure that your development team has highly-developed UI and web design skills, but in testing, these skills need to be specifically refined for the user experience.

This is why it is important to have fresh eyes on your project. If you use the same developers to test the product that created it, they might miss something that an outside eye would catch. They might think, for example, that a certain feature is intuitive (because they have been using it for months) when a normal user might find it hard to figure out. The solution is to use testers outside of the developers that have been working on that particular project.

Another thing to consider is the need to test different languages and different conditions. In our era of globalization, many digital products are made for an international audience. Do you have native speakers to look over it and check for typos and misspelled words? Do you have teams abroad that are able to test your product in real conditions and from a native’s perspective?

If you said yes to these three questions, you are well equipped to take on QA on your own. If you said no to one or more of these questions, it might be good to outsource your QA. Please let us know if you would like any more information about QA testing.