How remote QA can add value to your organisation
In this competitive landscape, client's are expecting error-free, smooth running end products, and they expect them fast. . QA has become an important part of the development lifecycle to make sure the success of the end product. But having an in-house team for QA and investing in upskilling can easily become a cost centre. This is why software development companies rely on third party QA services or QA staff augmentation solutions to ensure the quality of their end product.
Benefits of remote QA
Offer competitive solutions to market
Finding the balance between quality and the cost of your software solutions is a challenge. QA staff augmentation allows you access to a large talent pool of QA engineers that are available at affordable rates. By utilising their services, you can either provide a cost-effective solution to the market or improve the quality of the product by increasing the testing velocity.
Accelerate time to market
There is no such thing called error-free or bug-free software. So, continuous testing is important in your CI-CD development process to make sure that you identify bugs and mitigate them before they accelerate. Once testing becomes an afterthought, you have to spend a considerable amount of development hours bug fixing. Also when your in-house team is overwhelmed with projects and responsibilities, fresh eyes can come in handy to identify defects and fast track your development process.
Right size your team
Staff augmentation is a smart way to scale up or down your project team. Introducing a remote QA engineer to your project team is much easier than augmenting a full stack developer. QA has become a role that doesn’t require any physical presence in this hyper-connected world and augmenting your QA requirement can positively impact your payroll.
Not bound by geographical limitations
Some projects required you ensure 24/7 uptime and a failure to do so can result in a significant loss to your client. When a project requires 24/7 monitoring and maintenance, recruiting in house is expensive. Hiring engineers from different timezones to assure quality and uptime is the best practice to guarantee both quality and cost-efficiency.
Enhance the end-user experience with user/manual testing
If you are developing a commercial product for the market, you can’t depend on the end-user to use your digital product and enhance it according to their reaction and feedback. Users have multiple options to select from and they will never return if they encounter a bad user experience. Even if it's a business-specific solution, your client won’t be available to actively test and validate your product as an end-user throughout your agile development process. The best way to overcome this challenge is by enhancing the manual testing velocity with remote staff. They can provide valuable feedback by testing your product from the customer's perspective. There are on demand testing solutions like User Testing that are designed specifically for user experience testing.
Capitalise on unique talents that can add value to the end product
QA engineers with specific skills and experience can add value to your software product. For example;
- Test automation engineers can plan and write programs to test and detect errors of your program in real-time.
- Software security engineers can ensure that your software is free of security vulnerabilities.
Such specialists are expensive to manage inhouse and are not required throughout the project life cycle. The best way to hire them is through specialised staff augmentation solutions.
How to mitigate the challenges of Remote QA
Understanding the challenges of remote QA and how to overcome them is important.
- Security - Data security is a legal requirement in developed nations while it's just a serious consideration in other countries. When you share access to your system with a remote employee you need to make sure that they are legally bound to a firm, and that the firm has sufficient policies and protocols in place.
- Reliability - You have to depend on a remote worker to deliver quality service and deliver it on time. There can be occasions that they fail to do so and that could cost you both time and money. Careful selection of a quality service firm with experience can help you with this and you can be on the safe side by adding a discount or a break clause to the agreements you sign.
It's clear that a quality QA service can help you to overcome some challenges in your software projects. Staff augmentation is a practical solution for QA in terms of quality and cost. If you are looking to add QA engineers for your next IT project, Maytech offers staff augmentation services with 15years of industry experience in software development.
