Looking for an IT testing company in Ukraine is a reasonable choice thanks to an impressive number of QA specialists in the country and favourable business climate. Ukraine is one of top locations both for nearshoring and offshoring software testing due to cultural affinity and small time difference with European countries and long-term cooperation of leading testing companies with both US and nearshore customers. What’s more, Ukraine has more than 1000 IT service providers, and about 90 % of them offer testing services. However, such a wide choice makes settling on a specific vendor a tall order.
Here are 6 criteria to help you choose an IT testing company in Ukraine:
1. An extensive portfolio of testing services
A company portfolio provides you with proven cases of successful testing delivered across various industries and technology areas. The portfolio of a testing company says a lot about the technology stack, team sizes, duration of the projects and presence of the experience and expertise in your domain. While looking through a company portfolio, you can see whether a testing company offers a full package of testing services, and whether it can address the platforms, methodologies, services, and engagement models you are looking for.
Presence of long-term projects and loyal clients on the portfolio is an indicator of both high-quality performance and capability to maintain successful communication.
After looking through project cases and references, consider contacting some of the company’s customers to learn more about the performance of the testing company you are interested in.
2. Size of the company, its flexibility and tendency to develop and grow
If your aim is not mere cost-cutting but efficient extension of your in-house expertise and leveraging its benefits, then you’d better opt for a middle-sized or a large company. The more expertise, resources, and available business models the company can offer, the more flexible it is, and more easily and quickly it can adjust to your specific demands.
What’s more, a tendency of a company of a steady continuous growth indicates of successful mutual cooperation with clients for customer satisfaction inevitably leads to increased in size teams and a growing number of the testing projects.
In addition, established IT vendors encourage and often fully reimburse ISTQB/CTFL/CTAL certificates, so they have more in-house test engineers who are certified and highly proficient in testing practices and technologies. Also, they have experience in more industries (such as healthcare, fintech, insurtech, telecom, hospitality, etc.) and more resources to successfully accomplish a specific project. Such outsourcing providers can either leverage their existing hardware and software environments as a testing platform or set up a software test lab tailored to your needs. Those vendors have better recruitment capabilities to engage necessary resources on demand. For instance, at N-iX, at peak load times, we can extend a team with additional temporary testers on a two weeks notice to execute test plans and test software for functionality, usability, reliability, security, etc.
It is also important to consider whether a vendor has experience in working with a company of your size and can handle several customer’s projects at a time if there is a need for that.
Related: Choose the company of the right size: top 15 vendors
3. A company with proven expertise in Agile Testing Methodologies
Testing in Agile fosters more proactive and predictive approach. Testing on the go allows you to be more flexible and lets you prevent more defects. Agile processes are often invisible ones, and they are characterized of continuous interaction and constant knowledge sharing within a testing team, with a development team and with a customer.
For instance, on our testing project, Orbus , independent testing is used, and each feature is tested by 2 people (peer review) to get a more objective view on it. Such practice enhances knowledge sharing and professional development of a tester, since they always get a peer feedback on their work, and this process is mutual.
If the project is pure Agile, thanks to very close interaction, and intensive knowledge sharing, the team formulates and writes down the best testing practices (e.g the best practices in writing test cases or test automation). It makes work highly efficient, and then those best practices can be shared across projects.
While communicating with your prospective testing vendor, ask how many Agile projects they have successfully accomplished. Pay attention to an overall percent share of Agile projects in the company.
4. A company offers an engagement model which fits you
Here are some of the available engagement models for testing services:
- edicated QA Team: the client outsources one or more testing projects to a service provider. The team is fully committed to the testing process and is completely accountable for it. Dedicated QA team works remotely, cooperates with the client’s managers and teams on the project. Such dedicated software testing teams can be extended if a need arises.
- n-demand testing: On-demand testers are partially involved in the software testing process and cooperate with other testers and testing teams who work on the project. Such engagement model helps companies split the work into smaller parts and outsource some of them to software testing service provider. This also helps to reduce costs.
5. Effective communication and transparent management hierarchy
Communication during a pre-sale period can be very indicative of the overall capability of a company to maintain seamless communication with its customers. It also says a lot about the speed and quality of responses. Another critical communication aspect is the management hierarchy of a company, and how transparent it is. You should find it easy to understand who is who in the company, and who is responsible for what. If the communication is performed through a lot of intermediaries, you are bound to stumble on communication blocks.
Keep reading: How to streamline communication with remote team
6. Aspects covered by the legal agreement
While communicating with business engagement managers of a testing company, ask whether all the aspects of your future cooperation ( travel expenses, vacation period, scalability, salary reviews) are covered by the agreement. Otherwise, later on you may have to handle them, and this will incur additional costs.
You may also like: How to avoid contract loopholes while outsourcing
Wrap-up
Ukraine is one of the world’s best locations for outsourcing software testing services to. However, choosing a specific company among about 1000 IT service providers is a tall order. While selecting an IT testing company in Ukraine, take into account several factors: what their portfolio says about company expertise in various domains and technology areas, long-term partnerships with customers, the tendency of a company to grow both in resources and in projects, available engagement models, how mature the company is in Agile Testing Methodologies, how successfully they can handle communication, and how many aspects are covered by the agreement.
