The Benefits of Outsourcing QA
In today’s fast-paced software development landscape, ensuring that applications function flawlessly across the myriad of platforms, devices, and environments is not optional – it’s essential. Businesses face an important decision when it comes to quality assurance: should testing be conducted in-house, or is it more efficient to contract with a third-party vendor?
While keeping QA internal may seem cost-effective on the surface, outsourcing to a specialized software quality assurance vendor nearly always yields far greater economic benefits in both the short and long term. Let’s explore some of the reasons why.
- Lower Overhead Costs
Building an in-house QA team requires significant investment in salaries, benefits, training, and specialized tools. These costs multiply if your software requires complex hardware compatibility testing across different systems and devices, as it then becomes necessary to stock a lab with appropriate devices, which is costly in both initial expenditures, IT support, and required floor space. By outsourcing, businesses avoid these recurring overheads and instead pay for the precise services needed when they need them; many outsource QA contracts can even be structured so that there are no retainers or recurring costs when testing is not actually required, greatly increasing cost effectiveness when such an option is made available. In other words, you pay for QA support only when needed. When there is no QA work to be done, your costs are zero.
- Access to Specialized Tools and Expertise
Third-party vendors bring with them a wide array of testing environments and advanced tools that would be expensive to replicate internally. For example, a comprehensive mobile device testing lab – with hundreds of phones, tablets, and appropriate operating system versions – is costly to construct, house and maintain; worse, it also requires constant upkeep and expenditure as new hardware is introduced into the market. QA vendors are able to spread these costs across multiple clients, ultimately giving your business access to world-class resources at a fraction of the price that it would require to stand up a suitable environment internally.
What about automation? Third-party quality assurance vendors are both expert and experienced with all the standard third-party tools (Selenium, JMeter, etc.) and can integrate their work directly into your development pipelines for timely and efficient testing of builds. Just as with hardware, this represents a substantial savings over upstaffing to provide this capability, and with a properly-structured contact, there are no unnecessary costs associated with periods of downtime. Plus, any automation that is developed by a third party will be owned by you and can be run (and even updated) by your internal developers as needed.
- Faster Time-to-Market
Delays in product launches cost money and worse, market share. Third-party QA providers typically have larger, more flexible teams that can scale up or down quickly to meet demand, allowing more resources to be assigned to alleviate temporary bottlenecks without the need for predictive hiring. This ensures functionality testing and other critical quality checks are completed faster, without overwhelming your internal staff or delaying release schedules when development schedules back up (and they always back up, at some point).
- Reduced Risk of Costly Failures
The costs of inadequate QA can be devastating – post-release bugs, security vulnerabilities, and performance issues can damage your brand and lead to expensive reworks. Outsourcing to quality assurance vendors with proven track records reduces this risk. Their deep expertise in, and experience applying, up-to-date QA methodologies means problems can be caught and fixed early before they become an embarrassing failure, or even force product rollbacks.
- Focus on Core Business Functions
By outsourcing QA, your internal development teams can focus on creating innovative features and delivering value to customers; this also helps alleviate the problems that can come with having only stakeholders and developers test builds – namely, being too close to the process to remain unbiased and see the bigger picture. Instead of dedicating resources to building up an internal QA department, businesses can allocate more budget to core activities like product development, marketing, and customer support – areas that directly drive revenue growth – while still having access to professional and unbiased quality assurance on an on-demand basis.
Conclusion
The economic advantages of outsourcing are hard to ignore. From significant up-front cost savings on tools, hardware and staffing to faster time-to-market with reduced risk of costly errors, third-party QA vendors provide substantial value. While it can be easy to hand-wave as an ‘extra’ task to be offloaded to stakeholders and junior developers, the reality is that the need for professional, fast, and actionable quality assurance results will not go away, and will only increase as a product gains traction in the marketplace, in the form of inevitable fixes, new features, and major strategic additions. Establishing a relationship with a reliable and proven third-party QA vendor gives any team an enormous advantage in overcoming these challenges without losing momentum or being distracted from innovation, and doing it economically. It’s a win just waiting to happen.
Beta Breakers has been bringing the concept of cost-effective third-party QA to life for over 30 years. During that time, Beta Breakers has supported the quality assurance needs of thousands of companies both large and small – proving time and time again that high-quality outsourced QA is affordable and effective.