Creating and maintaining software is a complex process that requires significant financial investments. Even a small project requires many specialists – managers, developers, testers, marketers, and more. Calculating the exact cost of engaging each specialist can be extremely difficult, as there are always details that arise during the workflow that may not have been considered during the design and analysis and budgeting stages. In this article, we want to discuss the factors that influence the cost of quality assurance and what options there are to save money without losing quality and speed of work.
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What should you consider when creating a QA budget?
Calculating a quality assurance budget is a complex and fundamental process requiring much knowledge. We want to list the events you most often need attention to and give valuable tips.
1. Hiring and training staff
Before hiring quality control specialists, it is necessary to determine what their goals are. There are also various roles and responsibilities among testers, which are also clearly regulated by the company. The next step is to develop a testing strategy that is relevant to the existing project. There are many options for finding testers – business events, hiring sites, freelancer platforms, recommendations from acquaintances and searching for reviews on specialized platforms.
By contacting a specialized QA agency that professionally deals with software testing, you can get a free consultation on all issues in which you are not very knowledgeable. Such an agency may help to determine what specialists are required, in what quantity, and ready to help determine the real goal, what will be the final result. Not many agencies are ready to boast of full client support from the moment of first contact until any moment when the client considers it appropriate to ask new questions. You can learn more about the importance of software testing and popular cases from one of the serious companies on the market – https://testfort.com.
2. Manual testing
This type of testing always should be included during the software development stages. It involves proofreading the code for the slightest errors. It’s also a great solution to check whether your software can do what it was designed to do, is easy to use, and has many other aspects. This type of testing can only be performed by a live person and cannot be replaced or automated.
The budget for manual testing includes the salary of a tester and a test analyst, who prescribes the main testing tasks. Sometimes, this work is done by the developers themselves, but the effectiveness of such a solution could be much higher.
3. Automation testing
It is a more complex type of testing, which involves the use of special tools for a deeper analysis of program code and only for tasks that tend to be routinely repeated. To do this job, you need to hire more highly qualified specialists who can write test cases for the tools. Although the testing stage is much faster and more efficient, the preparatory phase is quite complex and lengthy. When calculating your budget, you should consider the salaries of testers.
In addition, most testing tools are paid and have a fairly high price. For one-time testing of a project, purchasing all these tools does not make sense, while outsourcing agencies already have any such paid tools. The list of suitable tools depends on the specifics of the project being tested and is usually determined at the stage of drawing up a testing strategy.
4. Update Test Cases
It is not enough to write test cases once and use them regularly. As your software changes, you need to update your test cases they also need to be changed whenever the vector of the feature being tested changes. If you do not do this, the results will be false, and you may not notice hazardous errors. Writing new test cases requires more time from testers, which means a new investment on your part.
Factors need to be considered for evaluating a project
There are a large number of factors that should be taken into account to evaluate your project, but first of all, you need to pay attention to the following points:
- Required level of quality;
- Previous test results and industry data assessment;
- Types of testing and scope of QA testing;
- Testing methods;
- Level of detail in documents and test environments.
It is also necessary to pay great attention to the team’s selection, adaptation, and support. It is important to correctly distribute responsibilities between team members and establish coordination between testers and developers.
The main difficulty here is that it is difficult to coordinate third-party testers hired one at a time (example, hired single freelance testers). It’s a completely different matter when you hire an entire outsourcing team that has experience interacting with other client teams (developers, projects, managers, designers, etc.).
The main advantages of hiring outsourcing specialists
Most projects prefer to hire outsourced testers. This is because such cooperation has a large number of advantages. Outsource QA cost on average 30-40% cheaper than hiring employees for in-hous team. It is because you do not need to spend money on hiring and training, pay for vacation or sick leave, or organize a workspace or think about motivation of testers. In addition, at various stages, developers do not need the services of testers. So, if you hire an outsourcing team, you do not have to pay for downtime days.
Another undeniable advantage of outsourcing is access to specialists of various qualifications. So, To build a testing strategy, you need the help of highly experienced top-class specialists, but they charge a very high fee for their services. However, you can hire them once to perform specific tasks and then use the services of other testers who charge less.
