Case Study: Software Testing Outsourcing (Off-site Functional)

Challenge: This marketing firm with 115 offices in 56 countries is noted worldwide for its highly creative interactive marketing including providing their clients with flash applications and innovative websites. Keeping their development staff focused on creativity, the firm wanted independent QA testing focused on finding any defects. QA testing had to fit into the schedules of three projects without extending the projects’ timelines to firm’s clients.

Solution: To perform QA testing without impacting the aggressive schedules, we recognized that QA testing must be fully integrated with the development activities. Testing could not be left to the end of the project. The approach was to have daily incremental builds of the flash applications and website delivered to the QA test team by end of business day. The near-shore Chicago-based QA test team executed tests and logged defects prior to the start of the next business day, thus providing the development team overnight feedback on the quality of their latest software build. This flexible staffing also included having one bilingual tester to validate the Spanish version of the flash application.

Critical to the success of this off-site, off-hours approach was the communication between the development and QA teams. The lead QA tester was responsible for consolidating and reporting all QA discovered defects in the firm’s issue management tool in a thorough and clear manner. The QA lead tester also was the single point of contact for receiving and disseminating status information about the software builds and defect resolution.

Result: The firm was able to deliver high quality applications to their clients, thus reducing the time and cost of their clients’ user acceptance test and the firm’s development team’s cost of rework. QA testing was performed while meeting the aggressive development and client delivery schedules. With the QA testing team focused on testing, the firm’s development team could focus on the creativity expected by their clients.