9 qualities to consider when evaluating software testing companies

If you’re near the tail end of prospecting software testing companies to partner with, the lists can feel exhausting. The pressure is warranted – there’s a lot at stake. Your choice of software testing partner can mean the difference between clean functionality and quality issues slowing down your CI/CD pipeline and delaying production. 

Getting into the capabilities and qualities of a prospective QA partner can help you move forward. Cut through the advertising smokescreen of many technologies and sales banners. This post outlines nine qualities to consider in order to find a reliable software testing company to partner with.

1. Part-time and full-time flexible staffing options

Depending on your testing needs, you may benefit from part-time teams to help ramp up when needed or full-time dedicated teams to handle your testing. Look for a software testing company that provides multiple options that fit your use cases and helps you optimize your QA budget.

Find what software testing staffing model is right for you.

2. Testing Oversight and Delivering Transparency

You also want a testing partner that manages testers, providing the oversight and transparency you need to maintain consistency in quality and mitigate risk. This allows DevOps teams to trust the test process and identify issues earlier in the process. Companies should be offering a robust services department with clear communication between teams.

3. Integrations and Partnerships

The most effective CI/CD pipelines will seamlessly integrate testing into their tech stack. You want to work with a software testing company with deep pre-built integrations to enable signal-based testing within your existing DevOps systems.

4. Automated and Manual Testing Strategies

Avoid companies that market themselves as a one-trick pony. Ideally, your partner will give you the most flexibility – especially when choosing between manual and automated testing. Automation ensures consistency and immediate test execution while manual testing provides the flexibility and hands-on testing that you need. Look for a strategic testing partner that lets you shift left and right to meet quality, speed, and coverage requirements with fused testing.

5. Tester Quality and Certifications

The quality of your results will depend on the quality of the testers and the quality controls that are in place to manage them. Look for a software testing company that rigorously vets their candidates and requires certifications to prove their capabilities.

Testlio only accepts about three percent of applicants into its crowdsourced testing pool and requires candidates to achieve capability-specific certifications to verify skills.

6. Breadth of Existing Customers

You also want a testing partner that works with a wide range of customers of different sizes. They will be best positioned to have experienced testers and automated testing platforms to fit your needs. Check each company’s existing customers, case studies, and quoted clients. Are they all media? Are they all e-commerce? If their user base matches your profile: great! Otherwise, you may be left with software testing companies that are left in the dark of your industry type. 

7. Real device testing

When testing web and mobile apps, software partners should ensure dynamic offerings across operating systems, network connections, browsers, devices, and a global user base. 

Software development companies have two primary options for device testing — real and virtual. Virtual device testing solutions like simulators or emulators are great for early-stage testing, while real device testing is crucial to ensure an app’s success before it gets into the hands of end users. 

Often, utilizing a combination of testing options produces the best end product. Software testing partners that feature real device testing can cover a larger range of devices, users, and network realities.

8. Diversity of coverage types

From functional to regression to exploratory, great software testing companies will have a plethora of 15+ coverage types that cut across QA, QE, and DX. Remember when I mentioned ultimate flexibility? This is an area where flexibility and options will save your product. Look for coverage options that include the following:

• Functionality testing
• Integration testing
• Performance testing
• Security testing 
• Usability testing 
• Compatibility testing 
• Location testing
• Localization testing

See how we can help scale your coverage.

9. Crowdsourced vs Outsourced strategies

Crowdsourced QA testing can help scale your workforce as needed, providing significant cost savings compared to traditional in-house staffing models. It’s a great way to manage costs and complete testing rapidly. You get testers on standby that can jump into action when needed without having to pay for them when there’s a lull in testing. Burstable testing using a crowdsourced network of experienced tests also allows for additional flexibility to test on nights and weekends, often with short notice.

Crowd testing has considerable ROI, as high as 30% to 45% compared to in-house operations.

Outsourced QA testing is a model that uses a third-party testing time, using dedicated managed teams to maintain consistency among testers, test plans, and quality. Having a dedicated outsourced team is especially effective in managing quality control as part of your CI/CD pipeline for automated and manual testing needs.

Bright Health outsourced QA with Testlio to free up dev time and accelerate deployment while still maintaining rigid testing standards. After just a month of working with Testlio, Bright Health’s developers started generating 10% more code. With less time spent on testing, developers were more productive overall. Employee satisfaction and developer retention improved as well.

Opening up your QA strategy to include a software testing partner may feel like a risky maneuver, but limiting your product’s growth, or worse yet, releasing a broken app to your customers, is even riskier.