4 Signs Your Business Needs to Outsource Quality Assurance

Outsourcing quality assurance helps your business to enjoy the expertise and resources of a specialised third party. It allows you to achieve an unbiased and independent quality review of your product and business operations. The third-party will be laser-focused on making sure you release quality products.

The goal of outsourcing can include a variety of tasks, such as:

• testing software and products
• performing quality checks on manufacturing processes
• evaluating customer service interactions.

In this article post, we will be learning two things

1. Why quality assurance is important for your business.
2. Factors to consider before outsourcing your quality assurance.

Why is quality assurance important for your business?

i) It helps ensure that your products or services meet (and even exceed) customer expectations. It will then boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

ii) It helps your business maintain and enhance its brand image and reputation. Poor quality can damage your reputation. It can lead to negative reviews, decreased sales, and lost business opportunities.

iii) It can help your business avoid costly product defects and failures. This helps limit issues with product recalls, repairs, and customer compensation.

iv) It helps your business meet industry quality and safety requirements. It also helps avoid costly fines and legal issues for your business.

These are the four factors to consider before outsourcing your quality assurance:

1. Lack of required skills
2. The inability of an in-house team to manage the workload
3. Need for fast delivery of projects
4. Absence of impartial testing

LACK OF REQUIRED SKILLS

Quality assurance requires specialised skills, knowledge, and experience to perform well.

Some businesses try to conduct quality assurance in-house to cut cost. This is great until the business starts expanding and building new products that requires specialised skills e.g. a SaaS company building an app with an AI feature. The in-house team may not have the required expertise or training to test this new product.

The time, money and effort that it would take to train and up-skill the team can be maximised effectively if the quality analysis and testing was simply outsourced to a third party.

If your team lacks the skills to handle the quality assurance for a product, it may be unable to identify defects or issues in your products or services. This could result in releasing defective products into the market. There is no telling how much this can damage the reputation of the business and take a huge hit on revenue. By outsourcing quality assurance, your business can gain access to experienced professionals with the required skills, knowledge, and tools to manage the process.

This can help to:

Improve the quality of your products or services

• Lead to greater success for your business
• Enhance customer satisfaction

INABILITY OF IN-HOUSE TEAM TO MANAGE WORKLOAD

When your in-house team is not able to manage the quality testing workload, then it is time to outsource your quality assurance.

Quality assurance involves testing, bug fixing, and issue tracking. These activities can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.

As your business grows and you build newer products this will also require you to hire more quality assurance testers or adopt more automated testing measures.

A good way to cut through the rigorous process of employing new hands is to outsource the excess work to a third party. This helps save time on recruiting and training new hires. Outsourcing will also reduce delays in the release of products. The product(s) will also be released on time and to the required standard.

An overwhelmed team will struggle to give each project the attention it requires. This can lead to oversights or mistakes that can impact the quality of the end product.

Outsourcing quality assurance will ease this issue by providing resources and expertise needed. This can allow your in-house team to focus on their core competencies. As a result, your business can ensure the workload is well managed.

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NEED FOR FASTER DELIVERY OF PROJECTS

This point compliments the two previous points. Does your business need faster delivery of projects? Then it is a sign that you need to outsource your quality assurance. Timeliness is important for the success of any business and performing quality assurance in-house can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.

In the competitive world we live in, delays in product release can cause lost opportunities, financial losses, and low customer satisfaction.

By outsourcing quality assurance, your businesses can ensure that your products are delivered on time, without compromising on quality.

An outsourced team can work around the clock, using their expertise and specialised tools to identify and fix issues. This will always lead to faster delivery of the project. They can also help your business to reduce its time-to-market and possibly gain a competitive advantage in the industry.

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ABSENCE OF IMPARTIAL TESTING

Unbiased testing is an essential part of quality assurance, as it ensures that the products or services are tested without any bias.

Examples of bias/impartiality in testing can happen when the QA team lead, who is also the project sponsor, is heavily invested in cutting costs and releasing the product as fast as possible. As a result, he/she may not be objective in identifying defects or issues in the product(s).

This can affect the quality of testing and lead to releasing sub-par products. When your business lacks an impartial testing system like this, it is a sign that you need to outsource the service.

Outsourcing your quality assurance can help to address this issue by providing an impartial third-party perspective.

An outsourced team can approach testing with an objective viewpoint that is not influenced by any internal business dynamics. They are also more likely to detect defects or issues that an in-house team might overlook. This will result in a higher-quality end product.

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Now you know you need to Outsource your QA testing, what next?

“Do what you do best and outsource the rest.”
— Peter Drucker ‍

Prioritise reducing any form of guesswork and go straight into solving the problem at hand.

There will be no need for any damage control after the outsourced work has been done as opposed to doing it with an in-house team that already has a work overload.