Advantages of the Onsite – Offshore Software Testing Model
At first glance, it may seem like planning an onsite and offshore QA project takes more time and effort than doing the work completely in-house or outsourcing the full scope to an offshore QA team. But why do so many companies prefer the combined delivery method nonetheless? These are the biggest advantages of using onsite and offshore testing services:
- Uninterrupted software development and testing life cycle. When used right, this model can assure that there is work going non-stop.
- Face-to-face client-team cooperation. Close cooperation helps build better communication and also enhances the business relationship between all parties.
- A cost-effective delivery model. Offshore teams usually cost less and can be quickly scaled up and down, so you can easily reduce your expenses.
Potential Challenges of Onsite & Offshore QA Testing
As good as this delivery model is, there are possible challenges that can occur at any stage of the process. These are two of the most common issues encountered by the participants of the project:
- Onsite resources say that offshore resources don’t know what they are doing and are not available when they need them.
- Offshore teams complain that they are not getting the right inputs they need and that the onsite team is not always easy to reach.
The good news is that these issues can be easily resolved with enough commitment from all parties involved and clear communication. Here is how to remove those challenges:
- Remember that onsite and offshore are two sides of a coin. Both parties have an equal impact on the success of the testing project. The two counterparts should coexist in harmony; otherwise, this model will eventually be broken.
- Establish regular communication where all sides of the project can exchange information, share knowledge and news, and promptly resolve any misunderstandings. These meetings should take place over fixed periods of time — for example, weekly. However, you need to be mindful of possible time differences.
- Have a list of what you need to do for one another and make sure you are working on the list and updating each other on the progress. This will help each party have a realistic view of the work in front of them, both in the short and long term.
Real-Life Case Studies of Companies That Outsource Testing
Companies all over the world have been opting for offshore QA testing services for decades now. Interestingly enough, the scale of those companies ranges from small startups to acclaimed tech giants like Google, which goes on to prove that most companies, regardless of size, can benefit from offshore services. At the same time, the decision to hire an offshore software testing team doesn’t always bring the anticipated benefits. Here are some stories of companies outsourcing their testing needs to offshore vendors to varying degrees of success.
IBM: Scaling Automation Testing
Like many companies in recent years, IBM was facing the challenge of expanding its testing operations globally, speeding up product releases, and cutting testing costs. The solution was to outsource automation testing to an India-based vendor who implemented advanced automation frameworks for IBM’s cloud services and mainframe products. As a result, the average time to market for IBM’s products was reduced by 30%, while cost savings over three years amounted to 40%.
Slack: Ensuring Global Product Quality
As Slack was rapidly expanding its global reach, the company had to make sure that the product was reliable, scalable, and localized for different markets. Having quickly reached the limit of in-house bandwidth, and with the increased cost of such extensive testing, Slack opted for offshoring these specific testing tasks to teams located in Eastern Europe and Asia. The outcomes perfectly aligned with the project goals: the teams, who possessed deep expertise in performance and localization testing, helped Slack get rid of critical bugs that could tarnish their position in the global market while keeping the cost of testing reasonable.
Airbnb: Specialized Testing Assistance
In over 15 years since its inception, Airbnb went from a niche startup to a company with a global presence and continuously expanding operations. This created the challenge of ensuring the systems were equipped to handle spikes in traffic, for example, during the holiday season. With internal teams being overwhelmed with feature development, the decision to outsource testing to an offshore partner in Asia was a no-brainer. Airbnb went for a boutique QA provider specializing in performance and load testing. As a result, page load times were improved by 20% and the company saved 35% compared to the cost of performance testing being done in-house.
Global Print-on-Demand Platform: Advanced Solutions for Complex Problems
This example is actually something our team had contributed to. Several years ago, we were contacted by the leading eCommerce platform specializing in print-on-demand services. With 30+ million annual orders and a rapidly growing product line, the company was presented with the fairly common challenge of ensuring flawless performance across various platforms while keeping testing costs under control.
As the company’s offshore testing partner, we created a comprehensive strategy for dealing with the challenges at hand, as well as anticipating new ones and quickly incorporating the changes into the workflow. Among other things, we assisted the company with migrating to the cloud and helped introduce AI personalization in addition to delivering manual and automation testing services in collaboration with the client’s in-house development team. You can find out more about the project and its outcomes here.
US Healthcare Provider: Unmet Expectations and Communication Challenges
Now, we move on to the stories of how offshore software QA doesn’t always work out for the client. The first example is a US-based healthcare software provider who developed a new, complex patient management system and was looking to cut QA costs by outsourcing the entire chunk of work to an Asian vendor. Unfortunately, the lack of documentation, the difference in communication styles, the mismatching time zones that caused delays in feedback and corrections, and the vendor’s unfamiliarity with US-specific healthcare regulations like HIPAA caused a string of problems, including significant release delays, a product recall due to failing to comply with HIPAA, and the client having to hire a local testing team to make up for the shortcomings, negating any initial savings.
Lessons learned from this example are the importance of detailed documentation, the need to establish stringent communication guidelines, and the crucial role of additional testing for offshore teams to understand industry-specific requirements.
European Fintech Startup: Security Testing Gone Wrong
Startups, which are often trying to accelerate their development cycles while reducing the costs of development and testing as much as possible, frequently go for offshore testing QA services, and it’s completely understandable. The company in this example is a European fintech startup that chose to outsource testing to a vendor in Eastern Europe. The vendor, while proficient in various types of testing, including performance and functional testing, had little experience with security tests. The startup, in turn, failed to specify how much of a priority security testing was. As a result, several security vulnerabilities, including weak encryption protocols, were overlooked, leading to hackers exploiting a major security flaw and causing a data breach within a week of the release. Huge fines due to GDPR violations and the loss of customer trust were equally unwelcome outcomes.
Lessons learned from this case is the importance of finding an offshore vendor who specializes in the high-priority testing activities, whether it’s security, performance, or compatibility testing. Clear communication about the goals and desired outcomes is also a must.
Global Retail Giant: Failure to Leverage Agile
The bigger a company is, the more likely it is to have stringent rules and practices in place, so that products are released quickly and feedback is incorporated as fast as possible. For many companies, the solution that allows them to meet those goals is Agile development and testing methodology. This is exactly what happened to the company from our last example: while preparing to launch an omnichannel shopping platform, they hired a European offshore vendor to provide continuous testing for web, mobile, and backend systems. One of the key requirements for the vendor was the ability to be able to work under Agile principles. This is where the vendor fell short: finding it challenging to keep up with the rapid iterations and continuous delivery, the vendor was consistently missing bugs, delaying feedback, and failing to fully integrate their tools with the onshore team’s DevOps environment.
Lessons learned from this situation are the vital role of clearly communicating goals and requirements before the start of the collaboration. It’s also crucial to achieve methodology and tool alignment between the offshore and the onshore/in-house teams.
The Evolution of Offshore QA: Most Prominent Trends
The software testing industry as a whole is one of the most rapidly developing ones, and naturally, those developments have also been noticeable in the offshore QA industry. Here are the key trends signaling where this field can go in the upcoming years:
- Agile and DevOps integration. More and more often, clients are looking to integrate offshore testing into their Agile workflows to have a more predictable output and foster an effective collaboration with the development team. Moreover, offshore teams are becoming more involved in the DevOps pipeline, participating in continuous testing and helping improve the CI/CD processes.
- Shift towards automation testing. Customers are becoming increasingly interested in automation as a way to speed up the testing process and minimize repetitive tasks such as regression testing. A particularly interesting trend is the use of AI-based automation for the automatic generation of scripts and predictive analysis for error detection.
- AI and ML adoption in testing. Speaking of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, these two major technology trends are also having a noticeable impact on offshore testing. With faster and more accurate test case generation, teams can quickly expand test coverage. ML can also be used for predictive analytics to identify areas of code that are prone to defects, while AI is widely employed for self-healing automation testing.
- Focus on security and compliance. As cyberthreats are getting more common and more evolved, offshore teams are directing their efforts to in-depth security testing, including penetration testing and vulnerability assessment. Moreover, with the rise of heavily regulated industries like healthcare and fintech, offshore QA is also starting to include comprehensive compliance testing, including GDPR, HIPAA, and KYC regulations.
- Specialized testing services. While many companies choose to outsource routine testing tasks, so that their in-house teams can focus on more challenging parts of QA, other companies go for the option of outsourcing specialized types of testing to offshore teams. This can include IoT testing, testing of embedded systems, high-scale load testing, mobile testing on real devices, and so on.
Bottom Line
By all accounts, the decision to offshore your software testing is a decision that pays off both in the short and long run. On one hand, you avoid overstaffing and facing the increasing costs of hiring locally. On the other hand, you get to work with highly skilled employees on your terms without having to enter strict contracts and being stuck with a large team even when you don’t have any immediate tasks for them. Offshoring your testing needs helps you get the best of both worlds — high-quality work and smarter spending — and is therefore worth being considered. And TestFort, as a software testing company with 23+ years of experience, is ready to become your trusted provider.