LTS QA

Software QA Outsourcing has been a feasible solution for elevated QA outcomes, but it also received controversial opinions from many businesses. To gain a proper understanding of this matter and decide the trajectory for your companies, it is advisable that you acknowledge the following pros and cons of software QA Outsourcing.

 

Advantages of Software QA Outsourcing

IT Outsourcing in general and Software QA Outsourcing, in particular, have some significant advantages to bring about for your business if they are applied properly and orderly. These advantages include:

 

1. Cost-effectiveness

The financial impact always has paramount importance to the assessment of one successful software testing project. Regularly, after the software development process or software launch, business owners test software functions to ensure the highest quality. By outsourcing your QA processes, your business can avoid making major investments in infrastructure, software and personnel. But simultaneously, you are spoilt for choices with many outsourcing QA vendors competing over you.

 

 

Besides the differences in salary range between building an in-house software testing team and hiring an external QA team (which can be 31 – 33%, according to a report from ISO), software QA outsourcing can also help you reduce infrastructure costs and increase testing expertise.

 

2. Time-Saving

Instead of investing a huge amount of money for a long time with the hope to gain something back from your investments, you can start your testing project right away with an outsourced QA team.

This QA outsourced team has already had what it takes to have a fully functioning and experienced QA staff to work on your project. No additional time will be needed for training, onboarding, nurturing staff, as these are all taken care of by the vendors.

 

 

Moreover, the outsourced QA team will have the resources to fill in the positions of QA experts, helping your business have the experience and expertise to speed up the testing process. With such speed, your development life cycle is shortened, hence the faster time-to-market. Needless to say, faster time-to-market can bring you numerous other advantages such as the edge of competition, improved margins, etc. to your business.

 

3. Test Expertise

Expertise is perhaps one of the most important features that one business leader seeks when working with QA outsourcing vendors. With digital transformation acting as the major drive for businesses to change, the need for significant technical expertise is higher than ever. Even for a non-tech company, technology is still an imperative part for them to evolve and adapt to the tech-infused world.

 

 

But getting access to the testing expertise is not easy at all. Especially for medium-sized and small-sized businesses, their reputation falls short to attract talent, plus the limited resources. For a technical project, or a testing project in this case to succeed, a viable option is to get the expertise through an outsourced team. This outsourced team not only hires you the senior-level staff but also helps you gain subject-matter expertise of any kind. You can choose from a variety of manual testers, automation testers, test leaders, test managers, etc.

 

4. Flexibility

Outsource software testing offers you the benefit of a fast team scaling and quick adaptation to project changes. Put it simply, an outsourced QA team can be scaled upon requirements within a short amount of time.

Whether you want to scale up or down, the vendors can still adjust the team members that you want in no time. In case of changes in business trajectory or testing objectives, an outsourced team can also quickly adapt to your requirements in terms of technical skills.

To look further into this, you can consider more ways to maximize your flexibility in this detailed article from HBR.

 

Disadvantages of Software QA Outsourcing

Despite some of the major benefits of software QA outsourcing, there are still big bottlenecks that you need to gain clarity of to avoid the failure of outsourcing testing functions.

 

1. Low Security and Confidentiality

The issue of low security and confidentiality has always been the biggest problem that one business has to deal with when outsourcing their QA functions. Even for the most secured system, cybersecurity attacks can always find multiple loopholes to illegally exploit. And this risk is even heightened when you outsource your testing processes to an external party.

 

 

To be more specific, you share your source codes, customer data, reference models and workflows with the outsourced team. Without proper documentation and preparation for potential security risks, you are at greater risk of being copied, plagiarised and leaked.

Of course, this case only happens when you accidentally partner up with shady vendors, but the risk of low security and low confidentiality is still there. The one viable solution for this may be signing an NDA or reviewing the security processes before starting the project.

 

2. Lack of control

When you outsource your testing project to a third party, you are effectively signing over management control and decision-making to that party. Even though you receive the reports from the project manager or the team leader, you are still blind-sided to some extent.

There are still things unseen, words unheard and actions unsupervised. This lack of control can derail the whole project and waste your time if you don’t have the timely and actionable information for fix-up whenever problems come up.

To fix this, you need to come for those vendors that have a clear communication and working process in which daily and weekly reports are carefully delivered. In these reports, a clear checklist of what to be included is a must so that you can have clarity over your project. Meeting schedules, video-conferencing are also very useful and direct ways for communication and control.

 

3. Challenges with remote work communication

Remote work communication is inevitable when you outsource your IT functions, and it can create many communication challenges. In many cases, you even have to contact an overseas team, causing many additional problems. These issues that remote teams may stumble on include:

• Limited direct and face-to-face communication
• Different timezone and cultural traits (for those offshore testing centers)
• Technical limitations such as poor internet and lack of a common communication tool
• Late replies due to lack of physical engagement

 

 

With these problems greatly impacting the quality of a outsource testing center, businesses now need to take serious actions to improve their remote communication to ensure a smooth workflow.

However, for some businesses that are new to all this outsourcing thing, they tend to lack awareness and preparation for the communication process. Without a proper one, the vendor and the client are prone to failure and isolation, which are the last things you want from an outsourced testing project.

On how to deal with the aforementioned problems, Lotus QA recommends you follow the guide for Remote Work Communication Best Practices, which included the strategic features to cover for effective communication.

 

QA Outsourcing with Lotus QA

By partnering with Lotus QA, we strive for the enhancement of the benefits you can get from QA outsourcing and the minimization of the potential risks. At Lotus QA, we have a well-written testing process and communication process to put you through smooth and effortless operations and simultaneously give you close management of your project.

 

 

Lotus QA with one of our focuses on quality assurance can provide you with the best outsource software testing service. At Lotus QA, we can ensure you of:

• High Security: LQA not only follows stringent procedures of ISO 27000:01 for optimal security and international standardized process but also flexibly adapts to clients’ requirements
• Quality Human Resource: we ensure staff competency through strict rounds of interviews, on-job orientations, continuous learning & development for the most suitable QA staff.
• Flexibility: We provide different working models to allow clients to choose or change the plan at any time.

Contact us for more guidance on this:

• Website: https://www.lotus-qa.com/
• Tel: (+84) 24-6660-7474
• Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/LotusQualityAssurance

The New Year 2020 comes with a lot of plans and opportunities for LQA. Today, let’s have an interview with Mrs Xuan Phung – the ambitious captain of the ship LQA, to know more about LQA’s goals for this year as well as her life as a businesswoman. 

Happy New Year Mrs Xuan. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. Firstly, can you share with me about your ultimate goal when you started the company?

We aim to make LQA a global Quality Assurance (QA) company. We want to provide talented QA engineers to companies worldwide. We also want to support clients in making a high quality software products so that the end-users can use it without any errors. Last but not least, I want to make LQA a second home for my teammates where they can continuously grow up professionally and have a happy life.

What were your difficulties when you started your company?

The first difficulty I met was finding the first client. In the beginning, there was only me, no staff.  I faced a lot of obstacles, but I became more familiar with tough situations. I think solving problems and dealing with difficulties are my actual job. At the moment, I don’t think of those challenges as difficulties but as part of my responsibilities to grow the company.

Could you share with me the strength and weakness of this company?

Our strengths are that we specialize in testing, and we spend time and effort in making our services better. Since LQA is becoming more global, the company can cooperate with testing companies in different countries to understand the specific quality standard in these countries. Our team are talented and fast learners with strong determination. Our engineers have international testing certifications (ISTQB). Furthermore, our staff can communicate in many languages such as English, Japanese and Korean. LQA’s weakness is that LQA is a young company, so there are many things to learn as we go. But we always try to learn from each other.

What do you think is the best asset of this company?

I think human capital, my teammates are LQA’s best asset because great staff make quality services and satisfy the clients.

Why do you choose Japan to expand the business this year?

Made in Japan becomes a famous brand representing high quality. We believe that  as LQA offer high quality products, we can also provide our services to Japanese customers. Moreover, I think Japan is a potential market for ITO (Information Technology Outsourcing) because the country lack of human resources, especially IT engineers.

The rest of the interview about Xuan will be published soon. Stay tuned!

Watch our introduction video: LQA Introduction

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Lotus Quality Assurance (LQA)

Tel: (+84) 24-6660-7474
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://www.lotus-qa.com/

On 19th November, LQA was honored to join “Kanagawa business seminar” – the significant networking event with the participation of Kanagawa government officials, Kanagawa and Vietnamese businesses.

 

Here, LQA CEO Xuan Phung had a conversation with Mr. Yuji Kuroiwa (黒岩 祐治), the Governor of Kanagawa Prefecture, to share with him about LQA’s plan to set up a Japanese subsidiary in Kanagawa. Kanagawa is an ideal place for the establishment, as it offers a range of advantages. In geographical terms, Kanagawa’s capital city – Yokohama, which lies on Tokyo Bay, in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshu, is a major commercial hub of the Greater Tokyo Area. The prefecture’s government also gives special preference to foreign businesses. 

 

 

Mr. Yuji Kuroiwa was delighted with this plan of LQA, and he believed that this would be a great step forward for the company. The government will be willing to help LQA so that the company can develop, achieve much success in Japan.