Why leading tech companies always hire an offshore QA team for their projects

‘Many of those who hire software engineers offshore tend to overlook the importance of quality assurance and testing. As a result, products end up having multiple bugs, perform poorly, and may even cause security issues’, says Igor Tkach, Senior Director at Grid Dynamics.

Other than cost reduction, one of the reasons why business owners choose not to hire an offshore QA team is that they don’t fully understand the benefits of quality assurance and don’t see a QA team as a valuable contribution to a project’s success. They often think that their developers can take care of quality on their own.

However, a denial to invest in quality assurance can harmfully affect or even completely damage the whole business. The NASA Shuttle Challenger, British Petroleum Oil Spill, the Samsung Note 7 explosions are the world-known failures because of neglecting quality assurance.

1. Quality Assurance Saves Your Money

While there are many factors that can influence software quality in a negative way, quite often it is the client’s attempts to save money on hiring an offshore software tester that harm the product in the long run. If you are trying to save on testing, you are overlooking a vital aspect of software development and can undermine your product’s future success.

The more you postpone software testing, the more technical debt you will accumulate, and the longer it will take your team to fix all the issues. And fixing all the bugs after the product is developed might cause significant cost overruns and missed deadlines. This is why it is crucial to set up a thorough QA process that will run in parallel to development from day one.

For every dollar you spend on a dedicated QA team, you will be able to save $100 in the long run. The cost of change grows exponentially with time, so the earlier you start testing your software, the better.

2. Quality Assurance Ensures Productivity and Overall Efficiency

One of the main benefits of having QA engineers work under the same roof as the rest of your software developers will result in better team productivity and overall efficiency. All of your team members will speak the same language and will be able to communicate directly in real-time. As a result, any issues will be solved much faster.

A QA team can help the product owner keep an eye on whether the client’s requirements are met by the developers. As soon as an issue arises, you will know about it from QA reports.

3. Quality Assurance Boosts Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Hiring an offshore software tester will help you make sure that the final product fully meets both functional and non-functional requirements. This is especially important if you are not the end client, but an agency outsourcing product development to a subcontractor. In the long run, your customers will have a smooth product experience and will stay loyal to your brand.

4. Quality Assurance Makes You Ready for Changes

Quality Assurance software development is a highly dynamic process, and the requirements, as well as functionality, may change at any stage. A dedicated QA team can help you make sure every new feature works well with the rest of the product’s functions, and that the product still meets your requirements.

5. Quality Assurance Is a Valuable Long-Term Asset 

A QA engineer is in fact a product owner’s right hand and not the kind of employee you can easily do without. A QA engineer’s responsibilities may vary depending on the type of testing used. Anyway, they analyze and clarify requirements (together with the product owner or a business analyst), identify and report bottlenecks and oversee the process of bug fixing with developers.

As the name suggests, manual testing means that all the tests are executed manually (without any special tools) by a QA team. In this case, QA specialists run the program that needs testing on various devices and use it just like an end-user would.

Automated testing, on the contrary, relies on tools. It is executed autonomously, without constant support from engineers. QA testing team members use testing frameworks and pre-set scripts that run on autopilot and report any bugs or errors they find.

Manual testing is relatively easy to learn: there is practically no learning curve involved. On the other hand, QA automation requires solid engineering skills and a background in development: some of the programming languages used for QA automation in Ukraine are Java, C#, Ruby, and Python. As a result, QA automation engineers are far less numerous.

Functional testing aims at verifying that a program complies with all the requirements listed in the functional specifications. This includes testing the program feature-by-feature to make sure the output is correct.

This is one of the most popular specializations among offshore quality assurance engineers in Ukraine. Many specialists focus on functional testing, and most of them have over 3 years of experience in the field. This means that it is relatively easy to find a good mid-level QA engineer for functional testing.

Non-functional testing focuses on the way a system operates in general, rather than its specific features and requirements. It covers such aspects of software as compatibility, load, usability, and security. The most popular requests for offshore QA engineers specializing in non-functional testing are:

• Performance testing. By applying this type of testing, you can find out if the website or app you are building will be able to handle high loads. Performance testing specialists are not easy to find, and their salary expectations are higher than average.
• Security testing. This aspect of software testing focuses on the security mechanisms of your product and makes sure that it is resistant to a variety of cyber threats, including hacker attacks and data breaches. Quality assurance engineers skilled in security testing are even harder to find than the performance testing specialists and earn even more. That is why we usually recommend using security testing services from trusted partners instead of hiring an offshore software tester on a full-time basis.

• Performance testing. By applying this type of testing, you can find out if the website or app you are building will be able to handle high loads. Performance testing specialists are not easy to find, and their salary expectations are higher than average.
• Security testing. This aspect of software testing focuses on the security mechanisms of your product and makes sure that it is resistant to a variety of cyber threats, including hacker attacks and data breaches. Quality assurance engineers skilled in security testing are even harder to find than the performance testing specialists and earn even more. That is why we usually recommend using security testing services from trusted partners instead of hiring an offshore software tester on a full-time basis.

QA engineers make 16% out of 250K IT professionals in Ukraine. This means there are more than 14,000 software testers in Ukraine available to provide outsourced offshore QA services. And this number is steadily growing: there are dozens of specialized courses, both standalone and those sponsored by large Ukrainian IT companies that provide QA training.

Half of the Ukrainian QA engineers are mid-level specialists. Senior engineers and team leads make up about 17% of the QA engineers in Ukraine.

Average experience ranges from 1 year for junior specialists to 6 years for team leads. On average, QA engineers in Ukraine have between 2 and 5 years of experience in their field. The demand-supply ratio differs depending on the seniority level.

25% of Ukrainian QA engineers are working in the e-commerce domain, 14% – in mobile and 11% – in the Fintech industry. Other popular business verticals among offshore QA engineers in Ukraine are Gaming, Media, Telecom and Gambling.

54% of Ukrainian QA testers are well-versed in manual testing and 24% – in automation testing.

44.4% of Ukrainian testers work in outsourcing companies, 40.6% – in product companies and 9.7% – in team extension companies.

Offshore Quality Assurance service will guarantee a high-end product and a smooth user experience for your customers, hence bringing your company a competitive advantage and higher profit margin. 

We have been helping businesses from all over the world hire Ukrainian software developers and offshore QA testing engineers for 15+ years. We can help you hire a top-notch offshore QA team in Ukraine while offering a unique cooperation model. We offer on-demand team extension services through custom recruitment and retention. We will find and pre-screen tech specialists who meet your project requirements 100%. No upfront payment, no risks. Average time to hire – 4-8 weeks.

How does it work? You share your business and QA talent needs with us, we find a way to assist you and provide ongoing support. 300+ clients have already entrusted software development and quality assurance to us.