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Top Challenges You Have to Deal with Hiring a Remote QA Team and the Ways to Overcome Them
Even the world-famous, brilliant and sought after software from leading companies sometimes come out with bugs. Until a certain point, bugs are a normal occurrence in the development process, however, this becomes a direct threat to your business when your customers start using a buggy product. In this article, we talk about the need to hire a dedicated QA team at the product testing stage, the possible issues that you may encounter and practical ways to overcome them.
Reasons to Consider Remote QA Team for Your Product Testing
So, let’s answer the question of whether QA outsourcing is able to bring benefits to your business, or perhaps it doesn’t make sense to solve all the problems that we list below? Our answer is that this is definitely the right decision, especially since all the issues you may face when hiring a remote QA team can be easily solved just with a professional and reasonable approach. So, why should you consider this option to check the quality of your product once more?
- When you outsource your development tasks, you can save up to 60% of your budget because of the significant differences in developers’ salaries, especially in the case of offshore outsourcing. However, if you have decided to have an in-house development team, there is still a reason to save. Hiring in-house testers yourself will take a lot of time, and while you are in the process of searching the unnoticed bug will harm the experience of your customers. From this perspective, it is more reasonable to get a ready-made QA team.
- You may need your development team to stay in-house and constantly create something new, but testing is a post-coding process. It is much more profitable to outsource QA tasks than to expand your staff and make your testers wait until developers will do their job.
- When you hire a dedicated team of testers, you receive an all-inclusive service when all the processes within the team are already worked out. You do not need to organize everything yourself, choose and pay for testing tools, and you can expand/cut the team easily as well.
- Working with a dedicated QA team requires some organizational skills – from its part, as well as from yours and your in-house developers. This is the point when you may face some small stumbling blocks, however, it is quite real to easily step over them if you entrusted testing to a reliable partner.
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Communication Challenges
The organization of the communication process is the first question you will come across when ordering remote QA services. A remote testing team will need to be able to interact with you, and with your in-house development team. Obviously, the phone, email and instant messengers are not the best and not the most professional option for this purpose.
In addition, your in-house development team already has its own approaches to organizing communication and interaction, and when it becomes necessary to supplement your team with external testers, it is also necessary to choose such methods of communication that will fit into the system that is already adopted in your team, plus provide convenient interaction with the remote QA team.
Our experience suggests that the Slack channel is convenient for this purpose when there is a contact person on the part of the customer. In this way, a remote team of testers gets the opportunity to communicate only with him, and if necessary, a customer representative can invite exactly the member of the development team to whom a specific question is addressed. Thus, synchronous communication makes it possible to quickly respond to updates and changes by the customer.
Test Management Challenges
In order to correctly manage test issues, it is necessary to correctly connect special software for detecting bugs with the task management system. In the case of working with a remote team of testers, this is the only way to visualize the QA process, combine all test cases in one place, get the opportunity to see and analyze the result and compile reports on the totality of cases.
One of the most effective ways is to use Jira for tracking the issues and references, plus Test Rail to create, maintain, and execute test cases. Test Rail is easily integrated with Jira, and also provides maximum flexibility for creating test cases, monitoring the progress of testing in real-time, and generating reports.
In addition, Jira helps draw a clear line between QA and development tasks. This allows each member of the team, both remote and in-house, to see their workload and respond to changes in real-time.
Test Automation Challenges
Test automation is an absolute must for routine tasks. This allows the dedicated QA team to focus on testing new features, developing new test scenarios instead of repeating the same operation after each change. However, here, as in the previous case, it is necessary to competently combine the available technologies and applications so that the internal and dedicated team can work as efficiently as possible, and the customer can receive reports on the work done on time.
Our experience suggests that at this stage it is necessary to combine Test Cafe and Test Rail that we are already using to our process. This framework allows the testing team to create and deploy automated test scripts, plus it seamlessly integrates with Test Rail for reporting.
[text_on_the_background title=”Want to find out more about our process from the inside?”]Here is how we have coped with non-standard tasks when outsourcing
the QA team and developed new approaches to testing and reporting issues[/text_on_the_background]
Team Organization Challenges
When testing with a third-party team of experts, it is necessary to:
- firstly, clearly separate the tasks of developers from the tasks of testers
- and also distribute the load among the members of the testers team so that each of them performs an approximately equal amount of tasks.
As we have already said, Jira is an exciting technology for the first task, and Test Rail helps our team cope with the second. Built-in functionality makes it possible to distribute tasks evenly, track results, see statistics of completed tasks per day and evaluate the productivity of each tester in relation to your project.
Reporting and Result in Evaluating Challenges
Logically continuing the previous paragraph, all the data obtained during testing is easily generated into visual reports so that the customer understands what kind of return he receives from each member of the dedicated QA team. This is more effective than reports on the number of bugs found since they reflect the full picture neither for the customer nor for the in-house and the dedicated teams.
Conclusion
As you can see, it is quite possible to turn collaboration with a remote QA team into a seamless and efficient process. The important thing is to start from QA consulting, find convenient approaches for communication between teams and the customer, as well as choose the right stack of applications and technologies for managing project development and testing.
Want to supplement your development team with remote QA experts? We would be delighted to help. Ask us for a Free Consultation just now and hire dedicated testers almost instantly!
