The Manufacturing Software Guide

Chetan Patel

A company might consider Software Outsourcing a website's testing for several reasons. 1. The company may be launching a new site, or a new version of their site, and may feel that most testing tasks can be relegated to offshore provider. 2. The company may not have the resources -- people, skills, software, hardware or time - to perform testing. 3. The project to be tested may be of such as short life span that the company doesn't need any long-term investment in testing processes. 4. The company might want an independent third party to perform the testing, in order to get a more objective view of site quality. 5. The company may even be outsourcing the development and coding for the site, making the outsourcing of the testing a reasonable decision. (Even more reasonable would be a firm that provides the coding and the quality control for its own code.

The decision to outsource testing needs to be a well-considered decision, because most people who aren't responsible for the testing misunderstand the meanings and scopes of the concepts involved in testing. Two very important issues must be resolved before taking the outsource step: first, the company that owns the website must be absolutely clear about the scope of the job -- including the tasks, processes, and responsibilities -- that they want to hire out; and second, the company must be sure that they are speaking the same "language" as the test firm they will hire.

If I want to outsource any testing tasks for Website Development, I need to understand clearly the nature of the tasks, and how the tasks fit into the overall quality plan for the site. Many testing tasks can be parsed out to contractors; for example, hiring another firm to perform usability reviews makes excellent sense because many firms specialize in usability testing. Usability testing, however, is not the same as quality assurance, and if I hire a usability firm under the assumption that my quality assurance needs are thereby being handled I will be making a very big mistake.

If I want to outsource quality control for my site, I'm making certain assumptions about how I will do business. Quality control is a system for testing all output against a standard of quality; this is an ongoing process, because in a proper quality control environment all output has to be tested. If I hire a firm to help me test prior to launching a site, I need to either form a partnership with the test firm to help with future production or build my own team of quality control testers. Neither option is necessarily difficult, but I have to consider this before making the decision to outsource because the choice will affect my future workflow.

If I want to outsource quality assurance, I'm making a decision to introduce the test firm deeply into my company's decision process. Quality assurance is a pro-active process that requires close proximity to all phases and aspects of the creation and maintenance of a website. If I exclude the role of quality assurance from important meetings and discussions -- for example, design meetings -- I'm crippling the process. Quality assurance is an order of magnitude more complicated, more involved, and more important than testing of quality control alone, and assurance requires constant attention and a penetrating interest in improving everything. This understanding must play a role in any discussion of outsourcing quality assurance.

I do think that a skilled and dedicated testing firm can be a vital part of a quality assurance effort, as long as the process, and the relationship, are managed by somebody on the website's team who is ultimately responsible for the process. Outsourcing testing tasks is a great idea, especially if it frees up resources -- time and attention -- for the web team to focus on higher-level issues. I'd gladly pass off browser compatibility testing to have more time to work out architectural issues, for example.

Issues to Consider When Outsourcing Testing: I spell out some points below that I think are important to address when making the decision to outsource testing for a commerce site. This is a big decision, and approaching the decision itself from a quality assurance point-of-view shows that Outsourcing Testing is not simply a matter of jobbing out a set of simple tasks. Understand the scope of what you will outsource.

Tatvasoft - Offshrore Software Development Company
Alternative E-mail: chetan.patel@tatvasoft.com
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