Photo Credit: Marissa Anderson 2010
Have you outsourced development of your latest application?
Online freelance websites make it easy to outsource aspects of your application’s development process, from the entire process to specific tasks that are difficult or impossible to complete in house.
Whether you’re outsourcing for financial reasons or to access highly skilled people that you can’t find locally, outsourcing can at times result in communication and consistency issues that make creating an effective QA testing strategy more important than usual.
From communications issues across languages and cultures to code issues that go unnoticed when different developers work in different time zones, outsourced development can produce bugs that are challenging to spot without in-depth, detailed QA testing.
Below, we’ve listed three reasons you need a great QA testing strategy when outsourcing your development:
Outsourced Development Means Different People and Hardware
You’ve outsourced development of your application to a team of five programmers around the world, and things are looking good. Progress is rapid, and the application is under budget and ahead of schedule. You’re optimistically looking forward to its release.
The only problem is that it’s being built in five different environments, by five different people with five different hardware and software configurations. As a result, bugs that occur for one programmer may not occur for some of the others.
This becomes a particularly big risk when you outsource different parts of development — for example, development of specific features — to different people. Each developer might write code that’s great on its own, but that conflicts with the code written by another developer.
Since outsourcing means different people and different hardware, it becomes more important than ever to test your application for quality. Crowdtesting can help you quickly find bugs that result from outsourced development and make sure they’re fixed before your app’s release.
Outsourced Developers Are Less Likely To Alert You Of Potential Code Issues
When you’re developing an application internally, every developer is invested in its quality. Bugs that show up early in development could create problems for the same developer at a later date, so they’re quickly identified and fixed.
However, when you outsource development of an application, the developer that builds the app might not be the same person responsible for fixing existing bugs in the future. As a result, their motivation to alert you to potential code issues is far lower than that of an in-house developer.
Most contractors write clean code that’s built to work today and tomorrow, but a single bug that goes unmentioned by a developer early in development could lead to problems for your project if it goes unmentioned and you’re forced to hire someone else to fix it.
The best way to avoid problematic code issues throughout your app’s development is to carry out QA testing at every step of the process. The more you can test, the quicker you’ll find code that could produce quality assurance, stability or performance problems further down the line.
Communication Problems Can Cause Obvious Bugs to Go Unnoticed
There are obvious advantages to outsourcing development. You can hire developers are more competitive rates. You can hugely speed up the pace of development. You can hire people that are difficult or impossible to find locally, often at competitive prices.
There are also obvious disadvantages. One of the biggest is that a lack of communication from your development team members can lead to bugs that are easy to spot in a local environment going unnoticed until very late in the development process.
Lapses in communication happen in every project, but they’re particularly common when your development team is spread across different countries and time zones. Even with centralized project management, it’s easy for important details to get lost in inboxes and task sheets.
These missed details can lead to small bugs growing into big ones, and obvious fixes getting skipped over not due to incompetence or lack of attention, but poor communication. If you’re developing across time zones and continents, a solid QA testing strategy is a vital part of the process.
