Finding the right offshore QA service provider for your software project can be a tedious process. However, it can be done through careful selection and proper planning. This article provides helpful tips on how to overcome the challenges of choosing the best remote QA outsourcing vendor to succeed in your current software projects.
#4 Manage your offshore QA issues
Despite the processes are installed for implementation for offshore QA, and regular monitoring of the performance of your selected vendor or several of them, other work-related issues may remain unsettled. Oftentimes, the challenges are caused by the Agile technology used in software development.
Unexpected modifications in required software
A common challenge with offshore QA that employs Agile projects is that the software needs are frequently upgraded and altered. For instance, your vendor drafted a comprehensive and detailed iteration test plan, environment, and cases. As the software requirements need to be revised, everything should be created from scratch.
To enable your outsourced software testing vendor to instantly adapt to changes and not perform the testing without the necessary tools, the communication between your in-house and external teams should be consistent. Such flexibility can be achieved with the assistance of traditional project management and ongoing integration systems. Also, your dedicated development QA team manager should set daily goals and conduct weekly video conferences for monitoring aligned development goals and testing efforts.
Losing focus on testing processes
In undertaking any complex software development project, an offshore QA vendor may get confused with changing priorities and at times, this provides the most dubious and critical software features out of the testing coverage.
To respond to the existing issues, your QA manager should collaborate with outsourced software testing teams by developing a clear test plan for every iteration. Also, risk-based and exploratory evaluation can assist to identify priority testing activities to initially check business-critical and flawed software features.
Establish a binding contract with a QA service provider
An offshore QA contract should work as a legal foundation for both the software testing vendor and every stage of delivering testing services. It is crucial for managing your vendor performance should be based on a clearly defined testing metrics and milestones. However, a general QA outsourcing contract usually lasts from five to ten years. Your QA manager may see this as a complicated endeavor to have constantly changing Agile testing process to meet the basic offshore QA contract conditions.
With this, in ensuring a lasting QA outsourcing, it’s easy to include in your contract several service level agreements (SLAs) to manage the entire collaboration process into workable tasks. Every SLA must define parts of services to be delivered, timelines for their execution, milestones for every testing service, and define the testing KPIs. Through SLAs, these assist in identifying the highly flexible Agile testing processes.
