Offshore testing service is an exclusive way to beat the market competition and boost profitability and sustainability of businesses and IT enterprises. Offshore testing provides clients more testing coverage, faster test cycle, high-quality yet affordable QA services, cost-effective automation tools, test management within the budget, on-time delivery, and customized strategy with complete focus on project requirements. Some companies also feel that offshore testing is a complete testing solution. Cost reduction and increase in profitability induce developers to outsource testing and QA jobs to an offshore software testing company. Offshore testing too has its share of pros and cons. Lets discuss..
How secured and confident are the team leaders for their team members who are located to offshore? There are certain hazards any testing team can go through irrespective of their location – onshore or offshore. Testing, as it is, is a never ending process no matter which corner of the world you are. Below are the probable hazards for any tester:
- Testers have little or no idea about framing up to the mark test cases or write effective bug reports.
- Testers don’t have a clear understanding of techniques that can easily handle or manage abnormalities.
The uncertainty of the testers is a major concern for the team lead as he represents them all but he faces severe challenges while dealing with offshore members. Let us discuss some of the concerns of offshore testing:
- Offshore work is not transparent – it is not possible to trace offshore teams, as to what are their to dos and what is their next plan. If you cannot supervise your team, it becomes difficult to work in accordance and at any cost face to face communication is highly preferred than online communication.
- Difficult to manage the downtime – There is a possibility that at a time due to certain issue, there is no productivity. Say for example, power cut-out, poor network connectivity problems, viruses, excessively long build downloads, blocking bugs which require help from team members who are not available at that particular moment.
- Time-zone difference – this is a very important concern. The testing team may require help from their lead at any hour but due to the time zone difference, they will have to wait till the lead is possible to contact at an appropriate time, hence testing suffers.
- Accessibility – Due to the bandwidth, there are chances that the offshore teams are not able to access the servers and applications.
- Communication – Often projects lapse because of the language barrier. This requires a proper training program that can serve as a bridge to overcome communication gap between the onshore and offshore teams.
How is Offshore testing beneficial for the organisations?
Each organisation strives to provide appropriate solutions guaranteeing the best software product testing quality and QA services. Enterprises are increasingly resorting to offshore testing services in a bid to outsource routine work and focus more on core business. Increasingly companies are coming to realize that delivering high-quality software on-time and on-budget requires that they partner with the best-of-breed vendors for all aspects of the software development process. Companies add the advantages as below:
- Expert professionals competent to handle both offshore and on-site QA consulting and testing services.
- Affordable cost effective packages guaranteeing improved quality of software product testing and QA services.
- International standard of delivery ensuring quality with the given budget and timeline.
- Transparent and flexible approach that assures care for quality, budget, and timeliness goals of clients and incorporation of suggestions at every stage.
- Formulate policies and effective methodology for tracking of project status and quality goals and regular sharing of documentation and status report with clients.
- Follow a comprehensive security process capable of addressing all client concerns on physical, network, software, intellectual property security.
