Considering the global business advancement, offshoring is an excellent strategy for brands. It brings you a dozen benefits, including low labour costs, operational cost savings, round-the-clock services, etc. However, the smooth running of offshoring services requires efficient quality assurance checks.
Quality assurance is defined by Harman and Meek (2000) as ‘Systematic management and assessment procedures to ensure achievement of quality outputs or improved quality.’ Offshoring businesses play a pivotal role in keeping the quality consistent, fulfilling the customer’s expectations, and strengthening the brand’s reputation. This blog will explore several mastering strategies to conduct quality assurance effectively.
How important is Quality assurance in offshoring?
Establishing standardised quality assurance helps in risk management, service improvement, and reduction of reworking. High standard services always win the client’s trust, so QA must be a prime concern of service providers. Quality control, a part of QA, is a quality check for a product or service.
Neglecting QA and QC results in degraded services, clients discontentment, missed deadlines, damaged reputation, reduced profit margin, client churn, and much more. Recent research saying that QA expenditure should be as much as 25% of overall development cost indicates its importance.
Do you find mastering quality assurance a challenging task? Strategic guidance is here for you.
QA involves PLAN, DO, CHECK, and ACT. It starts with planning the methodologies, followed by quality testing, checking for changes, and taking action for improvement. Its activities include auditing quality, defining the procedures, and selecting the tools and standards. Mastering QA involves strategic approaches that may lead to the brand’s success.
Establishing Clear Quality Standards
Identifying and selecting the standards for the employee’s performance and software functionality comes under the QA responsibilities. Talking about the offshoring companies, quality standards should be applied and followed.
- ISO 9001 Certification
- Capable Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)
- DevOps Practices
- Coding standards
- Testing Maturity Model
- Security Standards
- Project Management Framework
- GDRP or HIPPA Standards for Data Privacy
- Documentation Practices
- Key Performance Indicators
Developing a Dedicated QA team
Building an efficient quality assurance team after assessing the skill set of the personnel needed. The developed team having ranking staff are answerable for implementing QA tools and standards, fostering collaboration, setting up QA metrics, and conducting in-process testing, documentation, and reporting. By investing in the right person, tools, and standards, your brand consistently delivers high-quality products and services to the stakeholders.
Implementing certified QA processes
Offshoring service providers have more pressure to provide excellent services to develop long-term relationships with the stakeholders. So, standardised processes must be opted for. Quality assurance processes involve the identification of objectives and complexity of quality checks. To accomplish them, the QA team,
- Establishes the methodologies and procedures for testing
- Creates a proper testing environment
- Provides with the QA tools and automation systems.
Leveraging Automation in Quality Assurance
QA teams in offshoring companies are conducting automation in their testing techniques. The following automation can be integrated with the QA processes of IT service providers.
- Test Automation Frameworks, including Selenium, Mocha, Cypress, etc
- Automation tests in CI/CD for detecting the code changes
- Automation tools for API Testing, including Postman or REST Assured
- Automation tools for Security testing, including OWASP ZAP or Nessus
- Automation tools for mobile testing, including Appium or Espresso
- Monitoring and alerting tools, including New Relic or Datadog
- Automated scheduling for running tests
Designing QA metrics and Key performance indicators
Quality assurance involves various indicators showing performance quality named Key Performance Indicators. In offshoring, the following QA metrics or KPIs are utilised,
- Efficiency Indicator showing the PRODUCTIVITY, i.e., how actively and excellently the project has been done.
- Impact Indicator indicating the CUSTOMER SATISFACTION with your performance.
- Effectiveness Indicator depicting the VALUE of your performance, combining the impact-to-efficiency ratio.
- Customer Service Indicator, i.e., CUSTOMER COMPLAINT RATE, showing how you deal with your customers.
- Safety Indicator depicting how your services are benefitting the customers.
Client Engagement in Quality Assurance
Keeping your client engaged and updated regarding the quality assurance process instilled in their project can develop their deep trust in the brand’s services. Client engagement can be performed through,
- Regular meetings
- Documentation and reporting
- Certifications of quality standards
- Participation in user acceptance testing
- Approval of data testing
- Developing a client-specific testing environment
- Complying with clients’ policies
- Client satisfaction survey/post project Reviews
Let’s have a look at the beneficial aspects of strategic quality assurance!
Quality assurance procedures incorporating perfect strategies benefit the offshoring service providers in boosting and maintaining their quality. Strategic QA techniques enhance efficiency and productivity and reduce cost and time investment. The results of several studies regarding the impact of QA on brand success are discussed below.
Enhanced Customer Satisfaction:
American Society for Quality (ASQ) says that a 1% improvement in quality leads to a 10% increase in customer satisfaction. So, quality-assured performance brings customer satisfaction and trust, resulting in long-run deals.
Reduction in COPQ:
COPQ -The cost of Poor Quality includes the expenses on retreating defects, reworking, repairing, customer complaints, etc. It’s estimated that COPQ is 15-30% of total revenue. However, strategic QA processes reduce the COPQ and increase the growth.
Increased Revenue Growth
According to Harvard Business Review, It is claimed that businesses with efficient QA testing achieved 39% more revenue growth than others.
Boosted Employee Morale
A study by Forbes Insights indicates that 67% of employees are happy with their jobs when a strategic in-process QA is implemented in a business. Thus, standardised services boost the employee’s morale and interest.
Conclusion:
Each strategy, from stringent quality control protocols to transparent communication channels, guides businesses toward excellence in their digital journey. By adopting and adapting these proven methodologies, organisations can fortify their offshoring endeavours, ensuring superior deliverables and nurturing enduring partnerships built on reliability and trust across borders. This pursuit of quality assurance isn’t merely a strategy; it’s a commitment to continual enhancement and a pathway to unlocking unparalleled success in the global marketplace.
