Businesses around the world succeed based on the quality of services they provide. The easier it is for customers to navigate and use the developed products & solutions, the happier they are with you as a service provider. Quality assurance plays a major role in making your products bug-free and intuitive. This means, once you deliver a pristine product to your customers, there would be a lesser number of do-overs or revisions, hence, saving time and resources for your business. 

Let me share an example of how a bad-quality product affects business, as well as, human lives:

NASA’s shuttle, Challenger, exploded just after minutes of taking off, resulting in the death of seven astronauts who were on board that space shuttle. The mechanical cause of this failure was the Solid Rocket Boosters ’O’ rings. An extensive report by Jeff Forest, from Metropolitan State College, points to a flawed Group Decision Support System which misinterpreted the risks and failed to communicate concerns surrounding Quality Assurance. The whole project was shut down at the time.

In light of this incident, we can say that Quality Assurance of hardware, software, or any product of any kind, plays a very important role in business growth. Lack of it causes a waste of effort, time, and money. Before knowing how Quality Assurance is profitable for any business, let’s first have a little background of the term ‘Quality Assurance Testing’, and explore the whats, whys, and hows of it.

What is quality assurance testing?

Quality Assurance is about making sure that your software conforms to the requirements set by the client, and it works without any defects and failures. QAs/testers should run the program by keeping in mind every possible scenario to detect any defects, ensuring a successful run of the program. Now, what do I mean when I say defect-free software? For that, we have to define the term “defect”.

Defect/Bug: A defect is an anomaly in the product, something that deviates from the expected behavior. For example, you want to log in to the website on your browser. The login button is supposed to direct you to the login page but instead, it takes you to the help page. This unexpected behavior is called a defect or a bug as it is not conforming to the requirement.

What does a tester do and why do you need them?

A tester is someone who assures the quality of the product by running the program for every possible scenario while testing.

Basically, this is what a QA tester does:

To ensure the quality of software under development, there is a series of processes followed to deliver a product — It’s called Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC).

STLC includes the following stages:

1. Gathering requirements
   Requirement gathering is the first and foremost step in the STLC. In large-scale projects, it is vital for the project team, i.e., project managers, developers, designers, and QAs, to know exactly what the client is expecting from them. The bigger the project, the more extensive the requirements. Requirements are gathered from the clients and their stakeholders in the form of a written document or prototype, generally. 
   
   Time is money. With poor quality requirements, projects either fail, are completed late, or go over-budget. This is a reason enough for any business to pull off their projects from a software company, hence costing you money.
   
2. Test planning
   Test plans are written to define the testing strategy. Test planning is done by the Test Manager or the Test Lead. It tells us how and when the testing activities will be carried out. It is done to plan the time, effort, and cost consumption of testing for the entire project.
   
   Test planning not only gives us a strategy for testing activities but also helps us estimate the budget of the project. Poor test planning leads to failure in reaching the milestones. In a fixed-cost project, it can cost you your time, effort, and money.
   
3. Test case development
   After test planning, test case development is the next step. In this phase, the testers create test cases that cover every possible scenario in a very detailed manner. Test cases are developed to ensure even the edge cases won’t cause problems in the workings of the software.
   
   Test case development, if done right, can save you money, because, in this particular step, you are making sure the software does not break at any step. Hence, this assures that no further effort of the developers is required and the product is credible. A credible delivery brings in business, which brings in money.
   
4. Test environment setup
   Setting up the test environment is a vital part of the STLC. Basically, the test environment decides the conditions on which the software is tested. This is an independent activity and can be started parallel to the test case development. In the process of setting up the testing environment, the test team is not involved in it. Based on the company’s policy, it could be that a developer or customer creates the testing environment.
   
5. Test execution
   In this phase, the testing team starts executing all the test cases in a particular test environment that was set up by the development team or the customers. Each test case is marked ‘passed’ or ‘failed’, depending on its failure or success. Some test cases can be blocked for execution due to some system constraints, and hence, marked ‘blocked’. If the test case is blocked, the relevant bug is reported.
   
6. Bug reporting
   When a test case fails, the reason is that it is not working as expected. Thus, a bug/defect/issue is logged using a preferred tool and planned in the test plan.
   

After going through all the phases of the STLC, the final test execution summary report with exit criteria is prepared to show the stakeholders whether the software is ready to be launched or not. So, testing the software by following the STLC will save you money as it takes care of your estimates of the effort, time and money you are putting into it.

When to start testing?

It is always preferred to start testing alongside development. An early start to testing reduces the cost and time to rework and produce error-free software that is delivered to the client. However, in the SDLC, testing can be started from the requirements gathering phase and continued until the deployment of the software. 

SDLC and STLC go side by side in a project. The diagram below can better explain how they are being done simultaneously while the software is being developed.

What impact does SQA have on your business?

In Software Quality Assurance, a defect is the stitch which resolved on time saves you time, money and effort. Allocating some of your resources to QA Testing can actually reduce your total development costs while also stimulating more growth.

SQA brings the following benefits to the business:

1. Quality product
   Quality is everything for a customer. It is achieved through proper testing of a product. If you want your product to survive in the industry, that will be possible when it has gone through testing.
   
2. Reduce developmental cost
   Finding defects in the earlier stages of development can save you a lot of effort. In that way, you do not continue building upon faulty code. A faulty piece of code can be longer than the one written upon fixing a defect. Reducing lines of code reduces the developmental cost.
   
3. Save time & cost in fixed budget projects
   In a fixed cost project, finding bugs and fixing them in the early stage of the project proves to be beneficial because when the deadline is here, there is no room for defects and efforts to be made. There will be a spill-over.
   
4. Customer satisfaction
   A happy customer is not a myth when a quality product is delivered. It helps you gain a larger number of customers. If you are a product-based company, when you deliver the software and customers use it, it will bring more customers and more customers to bring more money and business. When clients receive defect-free software, there will be positive feedback and positive feedback will bring a large number of projects to the business.
   
5. Less promotion, more recommendations
   A customer would love to use a good quality product. A product won’t need much promotion if a happy customer starts recommending it. So, the cost of marketing is saved as word of mouth will be the source of it.
   
6. Profitable
   Surely, the idea of hiring QAs does not seem profitable. It makes you think that you are spending more money. However, testing a product before selling it in the market will only increase the number of buyers. Nothing throws a software company out of business than an unsatisfied customer who regrets buying a product that does not work. It’s a long-term gain.
   
7. Client confidence
   Retaining your client-base so they bring in more projects is only achieved if the very first software you deliver is defect-free. The quality of the product leaves your client satisfied and they will always confide in your ability to deliver a quality product every time.
   
8. Saves corporate-level data hazards
   If you are deploying your software in an enterprise-level company that involves high-level security of data, without proper QA of the software, it may result in a defect that results in leakage of sensitive data. It is a hazard that’s difficult to overcome on this level of deployment. All of this could be avoided by testing the software beforehand.

All in all, the benefits of quality assurance are significant. Your software and your services gain customers, recognition and market value.

Debunking the myths

Over time you might have heard some myths about Quality Assurance and how it is not necessary or how it adds to the cost and time of the project. However, as of now, these myths have no meaning because almost every software development company hires not only developers but QAs for the projects too. QA reduces costs instead of adding to them. It is surveyed that a product delivered without testing costs a business more than hiring a team for it. A non-tested product is usually buggy, and may not cover the initially set requirements or direction.

Another myth is that QA is only done by the Testers. This is a big no. It is not only the responsibility of the QA but the developer as well. Developers have to give a working code to QA for testing and it cannot happen unless the developer tests it first.

Quality assurance is vital throughout a project’s life cycle. It always adds value to your business and saves you money by making sure that after a product is delivered, it is defect-free and doesn’t cause any problems to the client. Quality assurance and quality control, both fall under quality management and are essential to the STLC process. Testing and development should be done in parallel to avoid the defects found there. Quality delivery builds consumer-client trust, enhances customer satisfaction, and reduces developmental costs, which, in turn, adds money to your business.

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Quality Assurance

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Intuitive user journeys are at the core of aesthetic, functional, and impactful products. It’s simple: if users find it easy to use & navigate, and get to experience bug-free, secure software, they will be your happy customers. The way to achieve that is by ensuring that as your software goes through different development phases, all the quality standards are maintained. The easiest way to do that is to hire an outsourced QA partner.

Quality assurance (QA) testing guarantees the best user experience under secure conditions that protect users from hackers attempting to access their private information. While the developers make changes on the back-end of the software, QA testers ensure that the front-end experience is unaltered and functions properly. Now there are two ways to have a team for QA onboard: hire an in-house team, or outsource QA testing to an external team. It is deemed best in many scenarios to outsource QA if you do not have the best resources in-house. In this blog, I’m going to discuss the best ways you can manage your outsourced QA team, and how can it benefit your business.

Quality assurance is a practical solution for catching the major and minor errors before the product is released to the client, and hence, the people who are actually going to be using that product. Most of the time, the in-house staff does not have the time or resources necessary for comprehensive and complete QA testing, which leads to small errors leaking into the end product and becoming major issues. This leads many companies to outsource QA activities.

There are many benefits of outsourcing QA testing, including lower costs, highly skilled workers, and improved products. The outsourced QA vendor may have many industry-leading tools that can help release a good quality product. However, you should outsource your quality assurance testing strategically to ensure maximum output.

If I list down some of the pros and cons of outsourcing a QA team, they could be as follows:

Pros:

• Lowered costs of dedicated resources
• Focused & expert resources for QA testing
• Save team management time

Cons:

• Miscommunication occurs as teams aren’t co-located
• Disturbance of delivery deadline(s) due to broken workflow coordination
• Risk of privacy & confidentiality breach

What’s the best way to tackle these issues? One word: Outsourcing QA. There are a number of companies around the world that outsource their QA teams to businesses that are in need of a short-term QA engagement. It is becoming popular with global businesses, obtaining more marketability as it evolves into a complete, standalone industry. QA outsourcing has been in practice for a long time, and its prevalence depends on the value it offers to the customers, as well as the practicality of the business model. It is still very early to comment on how far QA outsourcing can build its foundation, as a whole separate service in the industry, but it will not be wrong to say that the stats are showing a promising future.

Choose the right outsourced QA partner

The success of your product is determined by how smoothly it runs, and quality assurance process plays a major role in it. So, it makes sense that you choose a QA vendor that agrees with your company’s vision, mission, and goals. When it comes to onboarding a vendor for your project or business, you need to go for the one that works in line with your business model, work practices and one that owns their work. In addition, there are a number of factors that you have to keep in mind when conducting market research for potential candidates for outsourcing. I’ve compiled a few of these below:

Cost-effective
The most common factor that urges businesses to outsource resources is the reduction in cost. However, don’t let this factor let you choose a firm based solely on the lowest price. Here’s where you need to be objective, go out into the market, do your research extensively and then decide. Always keep in mind: you don’t want to compromise on quality. 

Reliability & expertise
When choosing a vendor, it’s good to pay attention to the vendor’s references and success stories. A good vendor respects processes and documentation (test planning, test strategy, testing scenarios, cases & reports), provides access to test artifacts & templates. You can always judge a vendor’s competence by analyzing the skill set of the resources provided to you, their experiences with different companies and the number of successful project deliveries.

Availability of resources & services
Before finalizing a vendor, make sure that your outsourcing partner has around double the testers on their bench than your requirement, and that bench is managed effectively. Your partner should be an expert in performing all types of testing (manual, automated, web, mobile desktop, functional, performance, usability & compatibility, security, and API, etc.), so they may cater to your needs as your projects scale up.

Self-management
The motivation behind outsourcing, for businesses, is to contract out the time consuming & conscientious testing processes to a qualified external team, so they can focus on high-level quality management, code creation, and software design. From assistance with developing specified requirements to continuous testing during the whole application life cycle, a vendor should be self-managed to cover everything that comes under an efficient QA process. In addition, you need to ensure that there is an assigned QA manager on the vendor’s side so all related questions are addressed to the responsible person.

Understand who you’re working with

Like any business partnership, it is essential to understand who you’re engaging with. You need to know the other party before letting them in on the inside workings of your organization, and your trade secrets. The core of vendor management lies in understanding what drives your vendors. A QA vendor experiences constant pressure, operational costs, talent acquisition challenges, problems with other projects. Thus, you should keep in mind that excessive demands for price discounts may result in insufficient resource allocation to your project – the vendor may try to reduce the price by cutting their actual expenses (e.g. assigning insufficient or inexperienced staff, etc.).

Another thing to remember is, never dread to share information with your testing vendor (as much as the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) allows for). To deliver high-quality testing services, an outsourced team needs to understand your software, business, specific technical requirements, and user experience.

Choose a vendor that provides you a demonstration of their services followed by a report of presenting its methodology and the demonstration of test results. It’s the best way to understand the vendor and create a relationship based on trust and confidence.

Check-in with your vendor regularly
Assessing an outsourced QA vendor systematically helps ensure that your company gets exactly what you have aimed for. Thus, if the quality of service provided by your vendor doesn’t live up to the mark, you can promptly take necessary actions to mitigate them and ensure your targets are achieved.

QA performance management
In order to keep track of the team’s progress, it is essential to monitor how far and how well has the assigned project or software been developed. The smooth working of the deliverable will show if QA is performing well or needs to be redirected. Essentially, an outsourced QA team’s performance is evaluated based on the following criteria:

• Number of missed bugs or bugs slipped into production
• Quality of defect description (bug reporting)
• Correlation between testing efforts and outcomes
• Efficient use of testing tools
• Quality of testing documents

Is working with multiple vendors a good idea?

Hiring multiple vendors for multiple tasks can become hard to manage, and it’s seldom beneficial. It’s not cost-effective and there could be regular conflicts of interest. It’s better to hire a single skilled vendor rather than hiring multiple vendors and work closely with them. Regular performance assessments of the vendor can help in determining if your target is achieved or not, and if the vendor performance is not up to the mark, you can start searching for a better vendor.

For a situation like this, it’s better to have a list of vendors always ready with you. If at any point, you see that the team may not be performing up to the mark, you can always take a supplementary team onboard to pick up the lags.

Keep your outsourced QA partners happy

The quality of a team’s output is directly proportional to the satisfaction they have in fulfilling the demands of your business. It’s basic human nature; once you feel appreciated and valued at work, you put in more effort and hard work into your work, and never hesitate to go that extra mile to make brilliance happen. So, as a business, it depends on how you make your teammates feel; it is important that they know the importance of their role and the value they’re adding to your business. When your team works hard and is recognized as an integral part of your success, it develops a work-family culture and removes any alienation stemming from them being an outsourced contractor. I’ll conclude with a few pointers on how you can keep your outsourced team happy.

1. Give them a clear idea of your objectives and business
2. Respect them and their knowledge and skills set
3. Provide them training and constant coaching
4. Make ample room for the learning curve
5. Provide required infrastructure
6. Respect their values, culture, and time
7. Provide a budget for rewards and benefits for overtime hours
8. Recognize their achievements
9. Pay them well

Stepping towards success

We all know that technology is advancing across industries. Why not go ahead and apply it to your team management as well? You can leverage technology like video chats for regular sync-ups with your outsourced team. In order to make sure that everyone is following the same playbook rules, you need to help your outsourced team understand your business goals and workings. Once that’s clear, a well-established vendor would work with you according to your ways. Lastly, respect is an essential factor when two teams are from different cultures or are not located in the same place. Be it respect for their time zones, or using a certain project management software, both teams need to show mutual respect to ensure successful project delivery.

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Quality Assurance

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You may be thinking if you really need to outsource a Quality Assurance (QA) team for your business, or not. I understand. It’s a debate every company, regardless of its business model, goes through. If you’re dabbling with multiple products and services, and you’re thinking you won’t need an outsourced QA team, you may need to think again. Launching different types of products and services requires specific tools and techniques, and most of the time, you cannot find all the QA expertise in-house. If you set up your own QA team in-house, it will take tons of dedicated effort in terms of time and research. Also, many times, it’s just not feasible to invest in resources for a one-time project release. Once the project ends, you’ll end up having resources on the bench, rendering the ROI simply not worth it.

What’s the best way to tackle these issues? One word: Outsourcing. There are a number of companies around the world that outsource their QA teams to businesses that are in need of a short-term QA engagement. It is becoming popular with global businesses, obtaining more marketability as it evolves into a complete, standalone industry. QA outsourcing has been in practice for a long time, and its prevalence depends on the value it offers to the customers, as well as the practicality of the business model. It is still very early to comment on how far QA outsourcing can build its foundation, as a whole separate service in the industry, but it will not be wrong to say that the stats are showing a promising future.

What type of companies could best leverage QA outsourcing?

I know of many companies that don’t have any set QA processes in place, i.e. no dedicated resources. Let me tell you this, if you think your team of software engineers can handle development and testing, both, you’re mistaken. It’s not that they can’t, it’s just that the outcome wouldn’t be high-quality and there would still be a lot of bugs or inconveniences in the final product or solution. Imagine, if you write the code for an application, and then you’re asked to test your own work — you may be able to detect the flaws in logic (if any), but not in the user flows and user experience. That’s because you kept the client’s requirements in mind, not the end user’s journey.

Software testing is originating as a necessary element of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). You want to ensure your products pass through defined quality processes, and are quality approved. The companies that already have an established QA department and team usually do not require QA outsourcing unless the team lacks the skills peremptory to perform.

In addition, a few factors that may drive QA outsourcing could be:

1. One-time Delivery
   One-time delivery refers to, say, a project that is to be delivered to a client and won’t need continued QA, post-production. However, since you have to deliver the project to your client, you need to have testers with a very specific skill set. Now, one way to go about it is: train your existing, internal resources for those skills. But, it would take a lot of time and effort to train existing resources for skills that are only to be used once. ROI would be low and it would cause more harm than good by increasing project delivery time and cost. In such a scenario, you can always outsource your QA team and deliver a functional project on time.
   
   
2. Time-bound Projects
   The success of a team lies in its quality and promptness to deliver. As the deadline approaches, the pressure builds up, and that’s when a lot can go wrong. There could be obstructions in requirement gathering, design and even development, consequently, delaying the QA cycle & project release. Most of the time, projects are time-bound and such delays could result in increased cost & effort. To overcome situations like these, outsourcing can be a foothold. The outsourced QA team can help the internal QA team to get the work done in the predefined time bracket.
   
   
3. Budget Management
   Regardless of the delivery timeline of your project, it is always wise to find a cost-effective approach that results in high efficiency and quality — QA outsourcing is a cost-cutting method. It is very exorbitant to hire and maintain an internal team and equip them with different tools and skills. The easiest way is to contract a trusted company for QA outsourcing, so you can handle short-term, as well as long-term projects with ease.

How does QA outsourcing work?

QA outsourcing follows a complete contract and a systematic workflow. It is very important to double-check your objectives and how far you want to take QA outsourcing. Some questions you could ask yourself could be:

• Do you plan to build your own team in the future?
• Do you want to take a QA outsourcing partnership for a long time?
• What projects are you hiring a QA team for?
• Do you have a reputed outsourcing company in your mind?

Before going into the actual contract, set a clear perspective of your contract and objectives. Your mission and vision should be aligned with those of your clients. You and the outsourced company should be on the same page about future engagements, roadmap, and plans if you are planning to build a long-term relationship.

How much does an outsourced QA team cost?

Now, I know the most pressing question most of you would have is about the pricing. How much would it cost to have an outsourced QA team onboard? Generally, the payment is made on an hourly or monthly basis, depending on the business model. The cost is inclusive of HR, internal management, office supplies, office space, and additional expenses. This also includes cost for training, equipment, etc.

There are two types of costing methods:

• Cost Model: A fixed amount is paid per resource, and the third-party supplier (in this case, the outsourced QA team supervisor) manages this money (outsourcing company can spend money as per their plan and feasibility).
• Cost Plus: You know the fixed amount each resource from the outsourced team will get, however, you also manage any added expense, such as hardware & software requirements, network-related issues, and recreational plans, If any.

QA outsourcing has its risks and can prove to be a bumpy process, however, following the right plan can help you overcome the obstacles.

Pros & cons of QA outsourcing

One of the most frequently asked questions we get from our customers is: Would QA outsourcing be good for us? Should we go for it or try to manage it in-house? For all of you, I’m listing down the pros and cons of QA outsourcing, so you know how it may prove to be good or bad for you. It has its perks but we cannot overlook the risks involved. 

Pros: 

• Cost-effective 
  QA outsourcing results in reduced project costs If you are on a budget, yet want to produce quality work, and build a reputation in the market, QA outsourcing is for you.

• Enhanced quality 
  Outsourced QA teams have relevant skills & certifications. They can work wonders for your product, and assist in defining future sprints by prioritizing issues & features.

• Focused attention 
  With QA testing off your plate, you get more time to focus on your core competencies and goals. This reduces pressure on the devs, resulting in quick & high-quality delivery.

• Reduced time 
  Outsourced QA teams are equipped with the right tools and techniques. They begin working on tasks as early as they are assigned, allowing for quick project delivery.

• Enhanced user experience 
  An external team with a different perspective can bring up inaccuracies, miscalculations, and blunders, which may have been missed, otherwise. This results in better UX and helps with customer retention & engagement. 

• Real-time testing 
  Sometimes, a product is developed in a location quite different than where it has to be launched and run. This may lead to post-release issues, resulting in the loss of customers. It is preferable to perform software testing pre-release, and for that, an outsourced team located in the launch area can be a blessing.

Cons:

• Lack of communication 
  It is very easy to communicate face to face while working in the same place. Outsourced teams mostly are not co-located with the development teams. This can result in miscommunication and misunderstanding. 

• Expectations vs. reality 
  The outsourced company might not perform as great as expected, resulting in buggy deliveries and mistrust between the two entities. This can either be because of unrealistic expectations set by you or owing to the negligence of the outsourced team or the blockers underway.

• Privacy and security issues
  Many companies are not comfortable with sharing their private data and information with a third-party service provider. Risks like security breaches and data-stealing are very high. This is where the credibility of the outsourced QA team matters a lot. 

• Different time zones 
  The outsourced teams might work in a different time zone than you. When the work hours don’t overlap much, it gets very difficult to handle emergency issues and releases, resulting in unnecessary delays.

• Increased dependency
  Hiring a team other than yours is an added liability. You have to rely on external resources to perform well for your releases. The performance of your business not only depends on your team but also on the third-party team. If any of them fails to perform, it can affect your business adversely.

• Difficult to track
  Monitoring the progress of an outsourced team can be a challenging task. There could be stark differences in the actual progress and the progress that they may be showing. All of it could come to the surface at the time of release, and then, all anyone can do is place blame on misunderstandings about the progress. This could disrupt the entire project timeline, and not in a good way.

Optimizing workflows to help your business grow better

QA outsourcing gives optimal results, keeping in mind the budget and time constraints. It’s a general misperception that quality comes after development — quality check is not a process that merely starts when development completes. Rather, it begins as soon as the development cycle kicks in.

These days quality process starts right from the commencement of the project and lasts till the delivery. Even after the delivery, maintenance and enhancement of features require a dedicated QA team to keep a check on new and existing features and ensure they work as expected. With market competition increasing each day, quality has become a key driver to success. It is one of the most influential factors to build and retain a user-base.

There are a lot of well-reputed outsourcing companies in the market that offer experienced and skilled testers. Global businesses hire them to optimize their workflows and product experience. QA outsourcing is easy to establish but also helps in relationship building with different outsourced companies to get them to hire again once a project is successfully deployed. 

The pitstops and how to overcome them

There are a few things that you need to keep in mind when opting for external QA services. Since the team won’t be in-house, it is possible for some issues to arise. However, in order to carry out smooth project deliveries, it is essential to handle all issues, and do it in a way that doesn’t affect your work. For example, a few issues could be:

1. Handle communication barriers 
   It is very important to define clear communication channels and mediums for clear and smooth communication.
   
2. Scheduling
   Defining the working hours before you start can help both teams stay on the same page during software development and testing. The outsourced team should be available at the time you operate.
   
3. Document everything
   It is best to have everything related to cost and expenditure settled before the QA process is started. It is recommended to create a written contract to avoid any discrepancies.
   
4. Leave(s) management 
   Sometimes due to unavoidable situations, people need to take off, it is necessary to have backup resources in case of unavailability of people but the urgency of release.
   
5. Typical client-employee relation 
   QA outsourcing works amazingly well when a friendly relationship is built between the people across two companies. This increases communication and passion to work.

Is QA outsourcing the right choice for you?

In the end, it’s up to you to evaluate where your business stands and if you require an outsourced QA team. 

QA outsourcing is not so tricky to work with if you have a clear vision of your business model and its workflows. A well-informed choice of vendor, regular assessment, proper management and patience to deal with the challenges are the key things to consider when deciding whether to opt for QA outsourcing or not.

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Quality Assurance

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A/B Testing is a revolutionary technique for digital marketing, and a game-changer for testers to add value to the product directly.

A/B testing, which is also known as Split testing or Bucket testing is an experimentation technique used to assess the usability of a certain feature. It is usually conducted on two or more variants of the same application assigned to different user bases. It helps to identify the user interest, hence, helping the product to be more improvised as per the user’s needs. 

Why do you need A/B testing?

Before going into that, let’s discuss how a product becomes more popular and usable. How do you get new opportunities in your business? How can you make it more profitable? The answer lies in the effectiveness of the product, and it’s matchless marketing; using your marketing strategies in the right way is what sets a product apart. 

Now, the question is, how do we identify the best usable version of a product? That’s where the concept of A/B testing comes in. It’s simple – you can’t wild-guess the expected response. You will need enough real user data to understand the perspective of your audience. You run different experiments on different user bases to find out which is the best way to go. Then, you can evaluate your conversion funnel and marketing campaign to get data directly from your customers.

How do you plan an A/B test?

A/B Testing can be carried out on both web & mobile applications. For a certain feature, screen, webpage, or app, two or more variants are created, each with a different experimental feature. It could be a design-based experiment, functional experiment, or an experiment for optimizing clicks & conversions.

Today, we are going to look at some easy steps to get you started with split testing on the right foot, even if you can’t hire a professional to help you out. 

1. Identifying areas of visitor activity
   First, we need to identify the areas of visitor activity that are to be improved. For instance, an e-commerce website analyzed the user traffic & found out that users visit the app, add items in their cart but a major chunk of users leaves the site when it asks to sign-up. So, the registration flow is where we need to improve in order to gain more customers and lower the dropout rate.
2. Create variants on the basis of the hypothesis
   Taking the example of a registration flow for the hypothesis, we work on two possible solutions. One flow uses emails to register while the other uses phone numbers. This would be an experiment on ways to register. Another experiment could be on the input fields of the registration form – one form could contain fields that require the user to enter personal information, while the other form takes credit/debit card or COD information only. These were examples of two different approaches to create two different variants. Variants can be multiple, and totally different in nature and objective.
3. Create user bases for variants
   Once the variants are created, the next step is to create different user bases. A user base is actually a group of users generally categorized on the basis of similar interests or causes. For instance, one group could be the users who opt for COD (cash on delivery) and another group could be those who prefer paying through credit/debit card. You can also group users on the basis of demographics, such as age, region, profession, etc.
4. Testing variants with funnels
   In order to get statistical data, we need to create funnels before testing the user activity. These funnels are like checkpoints in your application to monitor the traffic.
5. Choosing the right variant
   Analysis is the key. After all the data has been gathered, we need to analyze the results for making the right variant choice. The data is now systematically organized, plotted, metricized, and driven to a conclusion. The decision would be made on a win-win variant.

Boost your bottom line through A/B testing

Accurate and well-planned A/B tests can greatly improve your bottom line. Controlled experiments and the resulting data can help you figure out the exact marketing strategies that work best for your business. You are more likely to emphasize conducting A/B tests before running ad campaigns and promotions when you continually see that one variant performs one, two, three, or even four times better than the other. It’ll help you decide what works best and what doesn’t, so you can optimize your products, applications, and content accordingly.  

When you know what works well, it makes it easier for you to make decisions so you can craft more meaningful and impactful marketing collateral from the beginning. The key is to keep testing regularly so you can stay updated with what is effective for you. Remember, since the technology industry changes rapidly, the trends change as well. This means, what may work for you in one month, may not work as well in the next month. The effectiveness of a test change over time, so it’s important to continue testing regularly. 

Here are some tips to help make your A/B tests more effective and impactful:

1. Test the right elements
   Designs & layouts, headlines & copy, forms, CTAs (Call to action), images, audios & videos, subject lines, product descriptions, social proofs, email marketing, media mentions, landing pages or navigations, etc. 
   
2. Achieve milestones
   Improved conversion rates, more user traffic, higher number of views or subscriptions, increased number of downloads, improved sales, improved time on page, etc.
   
3. Carry out multiple iterations
   A/B testing is not a one-time activity. It needs multiple iterations when experimenting with a variant. Ultimately, this will lead to a divergence or convergence point through metrics.
   
4. Select the right tool
   Identify the tool which best fits your testing experiment. Different testing tools provide different kinds of testing expertise. You just have to choose the one which matches your requirement.

Which tools are the best for A/B testing?

It is essential to select the right tool with features to suit your experiment requirements. There are many tools available on the internet, both free and paid. Some of the more popular tools are:

• Optimizely
• VWO
• Convert Experiences
• SiteSpect
• AB Tasty
• Sentient Ascend
• Google Optimize
• Apptimize (for mobile apps)

Let me give you a quick walk-through of one of these tools, Google Optimize (free) to help you better understand how you can set it up to gather meaningful data and drive results that can help boost your business. 

How to setup Google Optimize for A/B testing?

1. To start, you need to set up an account on Google Optimize. After logging in with your existing Google account (or creating a new one), it will ask you to add a browser extension. This will set up a container:
   
   
2. Start with creating an experiment. I have chosen a sample site, and my hypothesis is that the main page heading should be something catchy in order to get more conversions. 
   
   
3. After adding the target URL, I’ll proceed to create variants. I made one variant where I changed the title and text of a button, and here we go:
   
   
   
   
4. Select the target audience. Google Optimize offers various options for this purpose:
   
   
5. Google Optimize uses Google Analytics to gather the user data. 
   
   
   After you link your changes to analytics, next step is to deploy your code:
   
   
6. Setting the objective as ‘Improve conversion rate’, we’ll proceed to further Settings.
   
   
   
7. After the experiment has been rolled out for a certain time span and for the targeted user base, it’s time to find out the winner of the experiment. The reporting tab will help you to view the results:
   
   

NOTE: The above demonstration is just a quick overview. Google Optimize is itself a very thorough tool to work with. In order to explore it more, here is the link to view a short web series on this tool, which is really helpful.

Mistakes to avoid when performing an A/B test

1. Use original and valid hypothesis & statistics
   Setting invalid hypotheses & using someone else’s app statistics to derive your app hypothesis can weaken your experimenting ground. The results might not be that helpful, hence wasting the time & effort to carry it all the way.
2. Tackle one pain point at a time
   Avoid using too many testing elements together in a test. It might affect the accuracy of the results. Break the elements into smaller groups & pick one at a time.
3. Consider internal & external factors
   Using unbalanced traffic, picking incorrect duration, and not considering the external factors can be the reason for the failure of your experiment. These indicators play a pivotal role in this activity hence need to be taken care of.
4. Use the right tool
   Not using the right tool can be a risk too. The tools are customised for various purposes. Proper research and selecting the best fit is what makes it effective.

Wrapping up

Today, many industries are using A/B testing as a powerful tool to increase the audience viewership, subscription, and readership. Most talked about are Netflix, Amazon, Discovery, Booking.com, WallMonkeys, Electronics Arts (SimCity 5), Careem, etc. There are numerous other multi-domain industries which are using the A/B testing technique to get the best possible results.

If you’re looking to get started with A/B testing, you can set up a call with us and our experts will guide you about outsourcing A/B testing and easily reaping the results without investing your time or efforts. 

Pumped up to get started with your first A/B test? Awesome!

Don’t forget to share this blog and help spread the awesomeness! ?

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Quality assurance & testing

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After weeks of hard work, countless meetings, and a successful project delivery later, we’ve decided to pull back the curtains on exactly what it takes to assure the quality of a high-availability healthcare app.

Back in April 2020, when the first wave of the novel Coronavirus was at its peak, VentureDive reached out to the Government of Pakistan to help the country combat the virus through technology. As part of the ‘Digital Pakistan’ initiative, spearheaded by Tania Aidrus, an ex-Google executive, we collaborated with her team to build and launch the COVID-19 telehealth portal. It is a website specially designed to combat the crisis of the pandemic. It allows Pakistani doctors and all healthcare professionals to register on it and volunteer to remotely help the patients who might have COVID-19 symptoms.

Doctors who want to give back during Ramzan: consider volunteering your time by signing up to provide #Covid_19 consultations at https://t.co/6Joc1VFVRM

Deep gratitude to @venturedive, @ptcl, @eocean, @infobip & @ntc for making this happen.@zfrmrza @fslsltn @UdarOfficial

— Tania Aidrus (@taidrus) April 25, 2020

“VentureDive team, I cannot thank you enough on behalf of the entire team for leaning in to help! There has been SO much interest in the platform and what’s interesting is how much interest we are seeing in other verticals. For example, today we had a call with the Law Ministry who are very eager to do something similar to sign up volunteer lawyers to provide free guidance to victims of domestic abuse. I hope this is just the beginning of our working relationship – excited to have started off on doing something that I hope can help thousands of Pakistanis during this time.” — Chief Digital Officer, Digital Pakistan

Healthcare is a very sensitive subject and it was a technology to be used by millions of people across Pakistan. Therefore, it demanded the highest quality, with zero downtime, zero bugs, and intuitive user journeys.  In this blog, we’ve highlighted our experience of testing a portal that was to be used by healthcare professionals to reach out to patients via our technology.

What follows is a tale that tells the challenges we faced during the three-week-long project, and how we resolved them to successfully deliver a web and a mobile application.

The functional, security & scalability challenges of testing the telehealth portal

Before the project kicked off, the quality assurance team at VentureDive gathered the application requirements and shared them with the experts dedicated to working on this. A thorough documentation and sample mockups helped the QA team to begin working on the test plan, test design, and test cases during the development phase. We conducted daily stand-ups so the development & testing teams could stay synced and brainstorm on maneuvering through this project smoothly and in time.  We faced six major challenges during our course:

Time management

The main challenge was racing against time to meet the client’s expectations while ensuring the security of the sensitive healthcare data, and zero glitches within the app. This meant that the QA team had to keep track of every requirement and reporting templates for testing updates that helped the development team fix defects and bugs timely, prior to delivering any milestone to the client.

3rd party integrations

The application was to be integrated with third-party software such as WhatsApp chatbot for doctor-patient communication & telecom operators to enable anonymous calling mechanism and receiving SMS OTP. These were essential for fetching data from official sources and making sure both our applications remained in sync with the whole system we were creating.

Mobile responsiveness

The telehealth portal was supposed to be a hybrid mobile application, which meant that the testing team had to test it across various mobile devices and operating systems to make sure that it was responsive and compatible.

Security

Cyber attacks and threats are a real-world problem today with thousands of networks and websites being compromised each day. To help identify, classify, and address security risks, we performed vulnerability assessment and penetration testing activity including server VA, API penetration testing, and web application penetration testing to identify possible routes an attacker could use to break the system.

System performance

Monitoring the performance of the application was an integral part of building the portal, since we anticipated a large number of users, including doctors and patients. The QA team planned to automate the scripts on JMeter to determine how the system performs in terms of responsiveness and stability under heavy load and a huge volume of data.

Standards

A big challenge for the QA team was to keep the testing practices as standardized as possible even with a short time to spare. VentureDive believes in maintaining the quality of the deliverables as our utmost priority, regardless of the length, complexity, or intent of the project.

Adopting a smart testing strategy for successful project delivery

The process of Alpha testing was done remotely. The QA team collaborated and focused all their efforts towards detect any major defects in data security. We carried out usability, performance and security testing for private and sensitive information in a healthcare setup.

It was pertinent for the QA team to also analyze business criticality, plan around testing efforts in minimum time, make the application usable for thousands of users and ensure that testing was compliant with the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) standards.

The test strategy called for having separate environments for development, staging, and production. We performed the following steps in the given order:

Functional testing

Keeping in mind the criticality & nature of health-related projects, requirements had to be precise and the validation had to be perfect. We performed static analysis on requirements followed by actual test execution to meet the requirements and clients’ expectations. Data flow integrity and business rules were repeatedly tested via automated suites in our regression cycles

Tools:

• Postman for API automation & integration testing
• TestRail for test cases and test cycle reporting
• PostgreSQL for data validations
  

Cross browser testing

Browser compatibility was mainly focused on Google Chrome version 80+ on windows. Extended smoke and regression cycle was performed on Firefox and Safari for Windows and Mac respectively.

Tools:

• crossbrowsertesting.com
• Browserstack.com

Responsiveness

Understanding the market trends of portable devices, we analyzed the data of the target audience and performed UI/UX testing on mobile & other portable devices. The application was tested on 6 different Android and iOS devices with different screen sizes and resolutions having different OS versions.

Security testing

Thorough security testing was performed on infrastructure, API, and application level, keeping the top 10 OWASP standards in mind. 

Tools:

• Burpsuite
• ZAP 
• KALI Linux operating system

The QA team identified the following vulnerabilities during the security testing activity:

• Broken access control
• Broken session management
• Disclosure of internal directories
• Unrestricted file upload
• Missing server validation
• Sensitive data exposure
• Brute Force 
• No rate limit
• WAF & ACL implementation

Our goal was to immediately address these issues and recommend further best practices that should be followed as pre-emptive measures against any potential cyber-attacks.

Performance testing

The system undergoing the test was required to have a load-balanced infrastructure supporting thousands of interactions between the patients and the doctors. The flow includes the signup process including uploading of images, populating, and fetching patient data lists and assignments of users one to one. 

Tools:

• Jmeter
• Blazemeter

We analysed all the results, and generated an extensive report using SmartMeter, which was later shared with the stakeholders. The primary issues identified were load balancing, CPU utilisation, and WAF configurations. These were addressed and recommended configurations were made for resolution.

Project delivery

A standard process was put in place to validate the requirements and meet the client’s expectations. After complete and thorough testing, we demonstrated and delivered the project to the client successfully.

Wrap up

Working on the telehealth portal as part of the ‘Digital Pakistan’ initiative was a short, knowledge-packed, and completely amazing journey that helped us learn and implement advanced quality assurance methodologies for a secure application. We adopted agile software quality practices to align software quality with product requirements and accelerate the software lifecycle. In addition, the continuous feedback we received from the project managers helped minimize retesting for verification and validation. Our iterative approach and short sprints enabled us to deliver quality products within a set deadline, successfully.

Thanks, team for all the amazing support. As I mentioned on slack, thanks to your hard work, we have 3000 doctors signed up and 1000 who submitted their documents. I had an amazing experience working with you all and truly admire your work ethic and efficiency. We couldn’t have done it without you. We will keep you updated on the stats and the launch event! — Project Coordinator, Digital Pakistan

Here’s where having a process-driven, and designed around ‘best-in-class’ software technologies delivery model helped us greatly.  It enabled robust scalability while maintaining cost-efficiency within strict quality control measures.

Thanks for stepping up to swiftly contribute towards our nation in these challenging times. It’s been a privilege to watch such a well-oiled team in action. — CEO, Digital Pakistan

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HealthcareQuality assurance & testing

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