Onboarding a new QA partner is like onboarding a new employee: In order for them to do their best work, they need to know as much as possible about the company, the product, the culture, and existing workflow processes. While partners who have been in the industry for a while will know how it works and can get up to speed quickly, you should still be prepared to share knowledge, documentation, and other learning about your product and any existing test infrastructure.

Here’s a quick guide to help you successfully onboard your new software testing company:

Provide clear requirements

Your QA partner needs clear and actionable project requirements before taking any testing action. Project requirements help engineers formulate a complete and effective test plan, so you will need to specify the type of test required (in detail), your technical requirements (environment, language, platforms, etc.), and any caveats you may have. deem necessary. team needs to know.

Just as important as the initial requirements is your availability at this early stage of onboarding. Be sure to be around to answer any clarifying questions your engineers have about the list of requirements.

Transfer the right knowledge

If your software testing company has many domain experts, skip this step. But if not, you’ll need to make sure you pass on a lot of knowledge about your product and its place within the market, especially if you work in the financial, healthcare, or retail space, where huge amounts of sensitive user data is stored. consistently pass through your product. Domain experts will have a good idea of ​​the nuances of your product based on years of prior experience, uncovering pain points that can be easily missed by development teams and QA engineers, who can be totally competent, but not so domain experienced.

The other benefit of hiring a company rich in domain expertise is better communication. Experienced QA engineers will be able to convey bugs to stakeholders using the correct terminology and explain how the issue affects other processes within your product – what’s wrong and how it can be fixed.

Establish communication protocols.

Many companies still avoid outsourced QA due to the distance between stakeholders and the development team on site, and the engineers who are testing their product. But thanks to great advances in communication technology, outsourcing is a totally viable option. They may not be located down the hall, but with the correct protocols in place, it will feel like they are.

First, decide what kind of communication program you want to enact. Do you value daily status meetings over the phone, or will an email suffice? Do you need weekly progress reports, so you can update the CEO? Will you need a comprehensive retrospective meeting to review what worked and what didn’t? Your software testing company can be structured around your schedule and can connect with you via phone/video chat, instant messaging platform or email, whichever you prefer.

The added benefit of outsourced quality control is that the time difference works in your favor. Your code is tested at night and you can listen or read all the reports when you return to the office in the morning.

Are you still looking for the right one?

There are tried and true markers of success for offshore quality control providers. Make sure your prospective partner offers most of these:

– Hybrid offshore/in situ model
– High customer and engineer retention
– Continuous training on the latest methodologies and testing tools
– Flexible scalability of resources: they are ready to grow when you are!
– Extensive experience in different domains
– Experience in the implementation and design of automation frameworks.

As you can see, there is a fair amount of preparation required to onboard your new test partner. Be sure to keep an eye out for the beginning of the relationship, as it will set the tone for the future. The more prepared and confident your QA engineers are, the better your results will be, and the more powerful and robust your product will be!