Inhouse QA v/s Outsourced QA : Make The Right Choice

All companies out there may have different visions, but the end goal is the same: A successful launch of the product with excellent quality. To reach this goal effectively and efficiently, companies have to ensure that development and testing go hand-in-hand during each phase of the software development life cycle. Considering the complexity of current programs, the idea of delivering a product without any testing is terrifying.

When it comes to quality assurance or rather quality analysis of any product, here are a few questions that emerge;

What is the correct QA process?

Should it be In House, or should you outsource the process?

Which process should you follow to deliver an excellent product with great quality?

As a QA, you can answer all these questions by understanding both of these options’ pros and cons.

What Exactly Is Inhouse and Outsource?

Quality assurance is an integral part of the entire process of building a product with good quality and customer satisfaction.

So there are two options to perform Quality Assurance;

(1) Opt for inhouse, i.e., conduct QA process within your company, or
(2) Outsource, i.e., QA process performed by an independent company or a group of people who are not directly associated with the company

Some say that outsourcing your testing process is an effective solution, while others will object, saying it is just a waste of money, and having your testing team is a far better solution. Well, nobody is wrong here as both approaches have their own set of pros and cons. Read on to find out some of the pros and cons of outsourcing or in-house QA process:

Inhouse QA Testing — Your Own Avenger Team

Pros

1. Having your employees working according to your specific requirements will be a huge time saver as you don’t need to brief your requirements to an outside firm.
2. With your employees involved in the quality assurance process, you are at minimal risk of confidentiality breaches.
3. It can feel safer to leave your sensitive information in your employees’ hands rather than any outsider.
4. There are fewer opportunities for hackers as all operations are being performed under one roof, so not much information will be changing hands.
5. Communication will be an easy job if you use your employees to perform QA testing. Since you can have direct access to the persons involved because chances are high of you sharing a workspace with them. So if you have a question or an urgent matter needs to be handled by them, you can just walk over and ask them personally. Having information about work progress also becomes easy this way.

Cons

1. One of the most notable disadvantages associated with in-house testing is cost. When you maintain your own QA team, you need to hire skilled people, manage the cost of process-specific training for them.
2. An in-house testing team generally handles multiple projects at a time and with a strict timeline. It usually makes them reluctant about other possible scenarios that are beyond specific test cases.
3. There are chances that some crucial testing scenarios are skipped unintentionally, which can cause some uninvited production issues.
4. Economies of scales happen when a massive number of projects are done by an expert team resulting in the absorption of fixed cost among various projects. A company with its own QA department cannot grab economies of scale to the extent a professional and specialized QA firm can.

Outsourcing QA Testing — The Specialist Solution

Pros

1. You can quickly launch your product because you can get things done in parallel, so chances of growing your business are high.
2. Using an external company also helps achieve better quality in your software testing because they usually employ testers who are experts in different areas of software testing methodologies, opening up your projects to many possible testing techniques at some extra cost to you.
3. You can get access to skilled resources that your in-house team lacks. A lot of people struggle with spending technical time and doing necessary things. So, if they could hire a competent QA partner who could do that for them, they could benefit from the skills that they have built up over the years.

Cons

1. To give detailed instructions to the outsourced QA can be a headache since plenty of time needs to be spent to write the procedures or put them together into a complicated document.
2. You may need to train that person thoroughly about what your application is all about.
3. If you don’t put effort into hiring the best QA partner, you might end up spending more time & money than expected and still no result.
4. There are many examples of people who have invested plenty much into the projects, and ultimately everything goes in vain. Their only mistake was that they did not follow the correct procedures and did not get the right people in place.
5. While outsourcing the QA process, there are high chances of your secret code or program disclosed to your competitors.

Let’s Take An Example To Understand This.

Suppose a company develops an application that will be useful in susceptible health measurement projects, then here, a Quality analyst must have sound knowledge of the Healthline. In this kind of scenario, outsourcing the job to a Quality analyst or a quality analyst team would be the best option than training an in-house quality analyst team.

Now, assume that a company majorly works on developing e-commerce websites and applications. Here, the smart solution would be to train in-house QA resources so there won’t be a need for outsourced training people thoroughly about the work process and the technology and development.

Conclusion

As discussed, both outsourcing and in-house testing have their pros and cons, so choosing which is better solely depends on the project’s needs and the resources’ availability and skill sets. In our opinion, usually, one should always go with in-house as we do in ZealousWeb as well, but if one requires, they can go for a mixed approach of in-house and outsource.

Originally published at https://www.zealousweb.com.