When it comes to outsourced software development, an end-to-end solution which consists of all stages of the software development life cycle is typically part of the agreement between a software outsourcing company and its client organisation. But what about the prospect of further outsourcing only software testing?
Also applicable to in-house software development teams, outsourcing software testing efforts for your application or software that’s being built can offer myriad advantages. Here, we discuss what these advantages are, as well as how companies can establish smooth collaboration between multiple parties, when outsourcing software development stages across multiple agency partners.
Interested to outsource software testing for your software development project? Whether it’s with an in-house team or another software outsourcing company, EFutures can collaborate. Our team of experts can conduct comprehensive software testing and report on outcomes, to build an application that is correctly aligned with your organisation’s objectives.
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Encouraging an outlook that’s unbiased is one of the biggest advantages of singularly outsourcing software testing. Whether your organisation has a fully-fledged software development team, or your existing software outsourcing company caters to every stage in the software development lifecycle, your business will still benefit from the impartiality brought on by an external company.
Additionally, an external software outsourcing team may also be unfamiliar with the ways an app or software may be built from a technical standpoint – which can end up being a good thing as user journeys can be inspected to determine whether they are intuitive enough for brand new users that grace your application, once released.
Developers and testers within one software development team could end up missing key issues and elements as time goes by, owing to decision fatigue. Dedicated software testing companies, on the other hand, can help leverage software development projects by offering a brand new perspective from the outside, through varied testing styles and other nuanced procedures that may otherwise have not been identified by your existing software development team.
With limitations always presenting themselves even across the most advanced software development teams, a fresh perspective or two in the testing department can always help re-energise software development projects overall, especially through feedback that can help elevate UI, while also ensuring no elements have strayed away from end organisation objectives.
Being able to focus better on strategic and analytical areas of operations is usually one of the biggest drivers for organisations to engage in software outsourcing – and outsourcing software testing is also no exception. This applies both to in-house software development teams that may be on a bottleneck, as well as outsourced software development teams that either have limited expertise, or have their productivity hampered due to excessive workloads.
In either case, outsourcing software testing operations can help teams free up valuable time, in order to pay attention to tasks that demand the best use of their skills, while also availing a fresh outside perspective of app performance – a dual advantage.
With your organisation, software outsourcing company and software testing company now having to coordinate, it is important to make your organisation’s objectives clear to all parties involved. This helps every team member understand the part they need to play in order to make these objectives possible.
Whether it’s from your software development outsourcing partner or someone from within your organisation, communicating your company’s end objectives needs to address key areas such as:
These are just some examples, and depending on the specificities pertaining to your organisation, the industry you operate in, target audiences and the nature of the application being built, other nuanced questions need to be posed.
However, the above-mentioned questions are baseline, applicable to any organisation, and can pave the way towards having a discussion towards more company-specific matters.
Once goals have been briefed and all team members are mutually aligned, it is necessary to establish a system of communication and collaboration – preferably on a real-time basis. Using relevant task and project management tools to share progress and alert relevant team members for tasks they have been assigned can help streamline workflows across multiple parties.
Granular access permissions can further ensure team members only have access to what is necessary to get their duties completed, while version control can help maintain one flagship document across multiple collaborators, in turn eliminating the problem of duplicate documents. With the right collaboration tools, each team member shall have the resources they need to meet their deadlines, while managers can monitor progress on a real-time basis, at a glance, through dashboards.
In spite of maintaining real-time task and project management tools to foster collaboration between your organisation, your software outsourcing company and your outsourced testing provider, it is still important to meet in order to discuss progress. Even though it may sometimes seem that nothing worthwhile remains in the agenda to be discussed, meeting regularly (at least once a week) can help team members get the opportunity to express concerns that cannot best be expressed in writing.
Conversely, giving team members a stage to speak up can also encourage raising concerns which initially may seem trivial, but could either be bigger than expected, or at least help spark an ideational discussion. With software development and IT outsourcing teams typically distributed across multiple regions, meeting virtually is a common and highly accessible option.
A regular schedule needs to be set in order to do so; with multiple time zones in the mix owing to various teams being geographically distributed, identifying which time frames are convenient is the first step to building a weekly meeting calendar that works for all parties.
As more companies choose to outsource software development, outsourcing software testing is also becoming a key item of consideration, owing to the advantages this brings to organisations and other software outsourcing teams alike. For one, outsourcing software testing is a highly effective way to introduce an unbiased approach to software testing, and to the overall quality of your software in general. Additionally, it also enables software development teams (both in-house and/or outsourced) to focus on tasks that require more of their strategic and analytical insight.
Outsourcing software testing operations means involving yet another outsourced company into your existing software development lifecycle. In order to ensure this alliance is successful, companies need to:
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