Offshoring

Quality Assurance:
A First-Timer’s Strategy
for Service Success

Global Leader in Independent Quality Engineering & Software Testing Services

 Letting go of what we know is difficult. Being able to see the team tasked with your
business success instils a sense of control and comfort. So, it comes as no surprise
that for the majority of us, lopping off a chunk of your organisation and handing it
off to an outsider an ocean away is a daunting prospect. The reasons to dismiss
the concept are common knowledge: Cultural and language gaps, time zone differ-
ences, experience levels, security threats, etc. There is no shortage of reasons not
to change.

But if Covid-19 has taught us anything, it’s that co-location isn’t necessary. Done
right, however, outsourcing your quality assurance function can have a tremen-
dous effect on your efficiency, flexibility, strategic focus and bottom line. It has
been done right with such regularity that the market for outsourced testing
services hovers at USD40b globally. Whether it’s right for your organisation is a
function of your understanding of what it takes to be successful. Drawing from 15
years of experience creating offshore testing services, this article explores what a
successful operation looks like.

Why do this at all?

Great question. You have a dedicated
testing team and they do their job well.
They understand your business, they
live and breathe your processes and
they know your systems and data
inside out. Why mess with success?
There are two good answers to that
question. The obvious one is cost. A
tester in India cost less than half of their
onshore cousin yet has the advantage
of having gained testing experience
across many businesses in any given
industry group. But more importantly,
is your onsite tester engaged in what is
best for them and the company? Most
business analysts would much rather
be improving the business than creat-
ing test cases and chances are, their
skills and knowledge can create much
more value to the company if they are
utilized elsewhere. Additionally, the
collective wisdom and learning of the
outsourced team can be put to use to
improve your Quality.

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 What do you need to do to be successful?

You believe the outsourcing route makes sense for your business? Great. Now
define what success looks like. An outsourcing service contract is a complex
beast, so this is where you need to define what your new partner must achieve
for your decision to pay dividends. There are two main components of success.
Firstly, the defining of both hard (e.g. efficiency) and soft (e.g. satisfaction) met-
rics that must be quantitatively and qualitatively measured. These targets are
expressed in minute detail in a Service Level Agreement (SLAs), Key Performance
Indicators (KPIs) and are embraced as gospel by your partner. The second, and
often neglected key to success is managing change. Humans decide whether
new ways of working succeed so the most critical member of your transition
team is the person managing change

Who is the right partner?

There is no way of veiling the fact that

designing, building, validating and
initiating an offshore testing service is
complex and arduous. It is a jointly
owned endeavour and without trust &
transparency between you and your
service partner, the initiative will
weaken and fail. When assessing the
pitches of organisations competing for
the right to be your partner, go beyond
the sales presentations, RFP respons-
es, methodologies, accelerators, refer-
ences and other key elements of a
tender. Choose a team who you feel is
culturally aligned with your business
and whose personalities align with
those of your team’s. The freedom to
choose a partner you can trust is yours
and this trust should be at the top of
your selection criteria. Your
programme leader and their counter-
part from your partner’s company will
be foxhole buddies so their working
relationship is a key to success. Lastly,
get to know the people who will be
doing the work, where they work.

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 What approach is right for me?
There is a continuum of operational
models designed to meet every busi-
ness need from maximum control to
maximum savings. Depending on
which end of this spectrum works best
for you, service models range from
on-site staff augmentation to an
offshore managed service. Most busi-
nesses choose a flavour somewhere in
the middle, i.e. one that retains the
core knowledge of your subject matter
experts for test validation purposes
but engages an offshore team for the
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heavy lifting. This ‘co-sourced’ model
also allows the flexibility to synch
supply with demand using a core/flex-
/crowdsource staffing approach. Staff-
ing isn’t the only consideration when
choosing the best resourcing model fit.
There are also myriad pricing models
including time & materials, fixed price,
gain share, output-based and outcome
aligned. They all have their pros and
cons but time & materials or fixed price
per project or release are the best start-
ing points.
How do I get from where I am to
where I want to be?
It’s quite easy to underestimate the
complexity of creating an offshore
testing capability so detailed due
diligence, a clear definition of scope
and a transparent approach to assess-
ing programme health is essential. In
addition to a clearly outlined and
agreed upon Statement of Work includ-
ing workplan, budget and deliverables,
the thoroughness of the knowledge
transfer process – the approach of
ensuring the new team knows every-
thing they need to know - is absolutely
critical. This means that every process
needs to be defined & documented,
taught to the new team and validated
for comprehension. The ‘cutover’ to the
new service is then validated for readi-
ness across dimensions of facilities,
technology, process, people & data
before coming online
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 How do I maximize my results?

The go-live of your offshore service is

not unlike the experience of cutting
over to a new enterprise system: the
initial days and weeks will be tense as
any service variability is addressed.
Similar to a system go live, readiness
traffic lights, risk mitigation plans and
roll-back procedures are a vital hedge
to the stability of your applications. A
well designed and implemented
service will show little to no perfor-
mance variability and after a few
months of operational stability, it will
begin to deliver the efficiency gains it
was designed to achieve: lower fixed
and variable costs, greater operational
flexibility, access to a wider array of QA
intellectual property and thought lead-
ership.

Summary

In its adolescent years, outsourcing was a tempting but risky proposition. Not doing
so opened a competitive advantage for your rivals but immature processes, cultural
and language barriers and clunky technical connectivity made the leap a hair-greying
proposition. Now a USD40b market, software testing outsourcing companies have
optimized their operations and produce with the efficiency and reliability of a Mer-
cedes diesel engine. The key to success is to learn from the experience of others and
manage the creation of your offshore testing centre with the same diligence applied
to the implementation of complex enterprise systems.

About the Author

Robb is a thought leader in the domain of software quality assurance

and based in London. His 20 years of consulting experience has included
clients and project locations as diverse as a global energy concern in
Cape Town, a multinational telecommunications company in Manila, a
mining company on Borneo, a global bank in Frankfurt, a major semicon-
ductor manufacturer in Shanghai and the United States Army at the
Pentagon.

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