How to Hire an Offshore Quality Assurance Team — Tips & Tricks
12 min
· October 21, 2022
Quality assurance is a critical stage of software development processes. When applied correctly, the QA process ensures that you build and deploy highly secure and quality digital solutions with zero defects. Achieving these business goals depends on whether you know how to hire an offshore quality assurance team.
But that’s where the challenge is. Out of the 310,000 global talent pool of QA testing experts, how do you build a distributed team? What do you need to pay attention to if you’re going to avoid mistakes? Here is an all-around guide on how to hire an offshore software testing team. Keep reading to learn more.
The typical benefits of QA testing include revealing quality inconsistencies or redundancies in software products, which might otherwise result in a poor user experience. Most importantly, the QA process ensures that the end software product complies with the current marketing and regulation trends. However, there are other perks as well, if you choose to hire offshore QA testing engineers instead of doing it in-house:
Hiring full-time IT talents with advanced skills, such as QA specialists can be quite expensive, especially if you have a long-term project. Besides the monthly payroll, you’ll also meet various hidden costs, such as employee benefits, allowances, equipment, purchases, and workplace maintenance.
On the other hand, you can save these unnecessary costs if you hire an offshore testing team. Talents in offshore job markets, such as Ukraine and Poland usually charge relatively affordable rates, thanks to the standard living costs in these countries. Moreover, dedicated QA teams only work when you need them, meaning you’ll only pay for the services that your business consumes at a time.
Did you know that nearly 36.9% of software development projects don’t get off the ground due to limited resources?
On the brighter side, businesses that hire offshore testers save significantly on operational costs. With this approach, they can stretch their limited budget to cover and implement new projects simultaneously.
Working with a remote team of QA developers means you can scale or increase productivity without the need of investing in extra capacity. Unlike full-time in-house teams, offshore QA engineers don’t need a dedicated office space and often come with their tools and resources.
Even better, you can scale or downsize your offshore team as much as you want, depending on the prevailing market demand.
A typical company can spend weeks or several months hiring a full-time quality assurance engineer within the local job markets. It can even be more daunting if you want to hire talents with unique attributes and qualifications, such as decade-long years of experience. For these reasons, the demand for talent is usually higher than the supply, something that affects rates, as well.
Fortunately, you may not need to worry about these recruitment bottlenecks if you can find offshore QA teams and hire them for testing services. Instead of spending months, you will be able to do so in 3 to 5 weeks, especially if you partner with full-service companies with a proven level of service, such as Newxel.
The benefits of outsourcing QA go beyond accessing bigger talent pools and saving costs. It helps you save time from the start as well. A business-ready team of QA software developers will take care of the technical aspects of your startup as you focus on other core business functions, such as marketing, customer service, or even networking.
Digital solutions always undergo rigorous testing to assess their functionality, as well as maintain product quality consistency. That said, you can hire an offshore QA engineer to perform various software testing services, such as:
Manual testing is critical in software development as the process helps stabilize the system in question. A typical offshore QA team for hire will include an in-person expert who will create the environment for manual testing to conduct an in-depth human analysis of the system. The tester hunts for bugs or any pain points that might complicate a seamless user experience.
Automated testing is done to address the shortcomings of manual testing and often involves a programmed machine. You can hire offshore QA testers to write the test scripts and oversee the whole automated testing process. Automated testing processes vary but their primary objective is to often check whether complex UI actions can result in the intended outcomes.
You can hire an offshore QA team to conduct performance testing and assess whether the system works within a given workload. Performance testing is important when evaluating the reliability, speed, responsiveness, or even scalability capabilities of software products. This test also measures the stability of the application during peak and off-peak consumption.
Here, the offshore QA team for hire will test the software product as a whole to evaluate whether it is consistent with all the requirements listed in the development process. The primary goal of this testing is to ensure that your business finally deploys a high-quality product in terms of technicality and functionality from both business and consumer perspectives. You might need to hire a different team, other than the one that built the application to perform this function.
Functional testing is important when evaluating whether the software product in question is in line with your business requirements. You can find offshore QA teams and hire them to perform this test. They’ll verify various output actions to get the desired outcome, which was the primary objective all along.
Acceptance testing is the final level of software testing, which determines whether the end product is ready for deployment and use. QA engineers will prepare the parameters to be evaluated by users before the program is finally moved to production. The end-user does most of the testing here, but with the oversight of QA experts.
The unit testing process is the first round of the numerous tests that happen in a typical software development project. The purpose of this testing is to determine whether different units of the software product function as intended. Technically, a unit can be any iteration of the development process, such as a program, function, or even procedure.
Integration testing usually follows unit testing. This process combines all the software product’s units within a program before testing them as one group. Businesses often hire an offshore testing team to perform various levels of integration tests and reveal any interface defects between functions. It’s also worth noting that the type of integration testing to be employed depends on how the test case units have been defined.
Choosing the right engagement model to work with when outsourcing QA services is critical, especially if you’re going to have success with the strategy. Typically, clients can choose from three options, including dedicated teams from Newxel, fixed price, and time & materials.
The dedicated teams by the Newxel approach focus on hiring talents to solely work on your project. Even better, this corporation model has proved to eliminate the drawbacks of fixed price and time & material models by giving clients greater control over the project. The service provider handles all other turkey functions, such as administrative support.
As the name suggests, the fixed price engagement model entails agreeing on a specific software development price with the service provider. The outsourcing team delivers the project within this cost and the specified deadline. On the other hand, the time & material engagement model focuses its pricing on the size of resources and the amount of time spent on the software development project.
That said, here are the pros and cons of every outsourcing engagement model if you need to hire offshore software testers:
| Engagement Model | Pros | Cons |
| Dedicated Teams by Newxel | Greater flexibility—the project can easily be scaled or downscaled
Access to expert global talents Real-time updates on the project’s progress Greater control over budget and resources The service provider assumes the backend office routine |
Requires a lot of planning
The opinions of in-house developers and remote team members may overlap
|
| Fixed Price | Highly predictable for time-bound projects
Seamless project workflow since all resources are allocated at the beginning Well-defined project requirements and specifications Fixed budget for the whole project |
Flexibility is not guaranteed
Requires expert planning at the beginning Requires numerous face-to-face meetings with the development team The cost changes if any new iteration is introduced to the project |
| Time & Materials | Offers greater flexibility without budget constraints
A low-risk approach for both parties Focuses on each iteration to ensure quality consistency |
Low budget control—the project might stall
Requires the client to be involved almost full-time The release date may not be certain |
As a software vendor or an owner of a tech-driven business, it will help if you know how to hire an offshore software testing team and avoid mistakes from the word go. Here are some effective tips to help you get started.
The first problem that you’ll most likely encounter if you want to hire an offshore QA engineer is how to find them in the first place. Independent QA experts for hire are available on different freelance websites. Alternatively, you can post a job ad, highlighting the project’s requirements and skills to attract viable candidates who might not be on freelance sites.
After knowing how to find offshore QA teams with years of experience, you can proceed to choose geolocation for hiring. It will help if you consider locations with relatively standard costs of living, such as Ukraine if you are going to save on the development cost of the project. At the same time, you should also consider a region with the highest talent pool to expedite the process.
Ideal team members should possess both hard and soft skills. The hard skills such as writing test scripts will help them deliver the project as per your expectations. On the other hand, soft skills will help the team members coexist peacefully, work with speed, and adapt to the culture and practices of your organization easily.
QA testing services are broadly categorized into manual and automation tests. The tech stack for these types of tests varies and will greatly influence your talent pick. However, most projects hire both automation and manual testers for greater quality consistency.
Saving time and budget is a priority of any business that wants to optimize its processes, as well as operation costs. But how do you do it if you hire an offshore testing team to work on your project? Here are some tips.
Dedicated team models for QA experts, such as the one by Newxel is a “jack-of-all-trades” when it comes to outsourcing. This corporation model includes any other service that your testing team might need to optimize costs and processes, such as HR and administrative support. This saves you the time that would be spent on fulfilling everyday office roles.
With the right engagement model by your side, you now need a clear vision to steer the team members. The best way to do it is by setting a goal for every development phase, to ensure that everyone sails on the same page. This will save the unnecessary time and resources that would otherwise be spent on new upgrades or ideas introduced in the course of the development lifecycle.
Being a team leader doesn’t necessarily mean getting hands-on with the technical aspect of the project—that is the work of software developers. Instead, you should focus on knowing your team better and understanding what they can or can’t deliver. That way, you set your expectations right and put you in a better position to communicate deadlines, requirements, and the importance of optimizing costs.
Newxel is a full-service company that enables you to hire an offshore quality assurance team within 3 to 5 weeks, thanks to our global hiring capacity. Talents hired by Newxel will remain in your team as long as you need them, given that they depict a higher retention rate of up to 94%.
Even better, we have a seamless hiring process that works in 6 simple steps:
At the same time, we offer up to three engagement models with your QA team, depending on your schedule, preference, or project type. This includes dedicated teams for specific projects, distributed teams if you want to test and deploy fast, or a global R&D center if you want to do in-depth research and next-gen product innovation.
Working with offshore QA teams is beneficial in many ways, as opposed to traditional hiring and engagement models for software developers. Leverage this guide to compare the cost benefits of different engagement models for this hiring trend and optimize costs throughout the whole project.
Contact us if you want to hire an offshore testing team today.
