PHP Automation Testing For Legacy Projects in India Fails

Are Indian engineers good at automating tests for old PHP code at growing companies? It depends. We get more requests from big public companies that have not used offshore teams much before. Many say they had problems with Indian teams. This happens with outsourced teams in India and also with Indian engineers hired to work in the U.S. or U.K. These companies are growing fast. They run older PHP apps that need fixes and test automation. India is often the first choice. The results usually do not meet what was expected. You can see similar reports on forums like Reddit. However, it's not about nationality. When you hire at a very large scale, certain problems show up more. Here’s how we break it down.

The Legacy PHP Challenge

In older PHP projects, the code was usually written without much thought about future testing. Everything is closely connected, and there are many global variables. Because of this, it is not possible to test a single function by itself.

Before you can automate tests, you need to change the code: rewrite parts of the program, get rid of unnecessary dependencies, and separate business logic from the user interface. This is called refactoring. Only then tests work as expected and actually save time.

Studies show that doing this work can cut the time spent fixing bugs nearly in half. If you skip refactoring and just write a lot of automated tests (such as with Selenium), those tests will often fail for no clear reason and will not give reliable results. This usually leads to disorder in the project.

The Indian Offshore Experience

Many companies handed the test automation of legacy projects to teams in India. Often these efforts ended in failure.

Reddit is full of comments like, "Three of my last four roles I was hired specifically to fix automation built by outsourced teams in India". In those cases, the engineers did attempt to automate the tests, but the code was poor and the frameworks awkward, so they had to be discarded or extensively reworked. Someone even claimed they'd seen "the most shit code" - tests written by somebody who had only heard of Selenium the week before and had no idea how to use modern tools.

Indian offshore teams delivered flaky or unmaintainable test suites, forcing the company to spend more time fixing tests than the tests saved.

Attracted by the low hourly rates of Indian contractors, the company moves its test automation work offshore. However, Indian offshore teams always cost more in the long run than just paying nearshore developers once you account for the quality issues and delays. It does pay less for each "hour of development", but ends up spending many more hours on rework, communication, and stabilization. As a result, the initial cost savings are partly - or even completely - eroded.

When legacy PHP projects (already risky for automation) are handed to teams with little context or oversight, it's easy to end up with a lot of tests that are poorly designed, or simply not aligned with the product's needs.

Fully Offshore QA Automation Team in India

When all test automation gets sent to a team in India while the main engineers work in the U.S. or Europe, problems usually appear. Companies that are new to offshoring make mistakes. The details of old systems get lost between time zones. Project management studies show that bad communication causes most project failures. This risk gets worse when teams work offshore.

Without good feedback, the offshore team works on the wrong things. They write tests that miss the bugs that actually matter. Problems go unnoticed for weeks. By the time someone sees the tests are broken, you already paid for a lot of useless work.

Augmented Onsite Team (Indian Engineers in the US)

Sometimes companies hire QA testers from India to offices in the United States or the United Kingdom. On site, it is easier to communicate with other teams. But if these testers receive only simple tasks and no authority to make decisions, nothing changes. Architectural mistakes remain. Code quality does not improve.

Culture matters. In India, disagreement with management and open discussion of problems is not encouraged. So testers do exactly what they are told ("just automate these cases"), even if it does not help. For example, they automate tests for legacy PHP code that needs to be fixed first. The outcome isn't much better than a fully offshore setup.

By comparison, teams from Eastern Europe (commonly used in nearshore setups) tend to communicate more directly — for example, Polish engineers are known for their straightforwardness. This style is closer to clients in the United States and the United Kingdom and easier for them to understand. It is often easier to work with them when honest and direct feedback on the product is needed.

Root Causes of Failure

Experience and Skill Gaps

If a PHP project is large and legacy, it contains a lot of complexities and subtleties. Setting up tests requires more than just knowing how to "click buttons" in tools like Selenium  —  you need to understand how the code is organized, anticipate where bugs might appear, and build a truly resilient testing system.

A junior engineer who's just starting with automation will most likely write tests that only work in the simplest cases (for example, when tests are run in isolation). But when it comes to real bug hunting and running tests continuously across the whole project, those tests will start to fail or simply won't catch real issues.

Good test automation requires a systematic approach. You must design the test architecture, keep an eye on maintainability, stability, and execution speed, and evaluate how well the tests actually protect the project from bugs. Simply "recording" mouse actions isn't enough.

Lack of Domain Knowledge

Large, long-lived products contain a lot of code that encodes complex business logic and one-off tweaks whose purpose may be known only to the system's developers.

An external team coming in "cold" may not understand which parts of the system are critical or how real users interact with the product.

If you automate test cases based on incomplete understanding, the suite will miss important scenarios (and real regressions) while wasting effort on trivial checks.

At older companies engaging offshore for the first time, knowledge transfer via documents alone is often insufficient. Key context also gets lost on infrequent cross-continent calls.

Communication Barriers

When the team in India is working at night while the U.S. team is asleep, if a test fails or an error appears the Americans only find out about it in the morning their time. That slows the process down because responses to problems are delayed.

If you arrange for teams in different countries to have at least a few hours of overlapping work time (when everyone is online), questions and issues get resolved much faster. Statistics show this can speed up task resolution by about one third.

Even if engineers in India speak English well, the average level of English in the country is lower (around 60th globally) than in, for example, Poland (around 13th). This can lead to misunderstandings  —  requirements may be interpreted incorrectly, bugs may be described unclearly, etc. Even small language mistakes or imprecisions affect the final result.

Process and Oversight Problems

If you bring on a team in another country — say, India — but keep them outside your day-to-day workflow, you're setting yourself up for trouble. Without planning together, talking through tasks, or reviewing code, that team lacks context and can easily build the wrong thing — or build it differently than the core group expects. From a distance, everything may look fine until the deadline hits and the bugs and gaps show up. But if nobody's looking at their pull requests, quality slips.

Reliance on Manual Methods

Not long ago, many QA teams in India ran tests entirely by hand. These days there are more automation specialists, but in some teams automation is still done just to check a box. For example, testers simply record their actions with record-and-playback tools, do almost no verification, and don't think about test structure. In other words, instead of real automation you get the same manual testing — just executed automatically.

This approach is unreliable: the automation breaks often and is hard to maintain. It doesn't deliver the benefits of true automation.

Real automation means treating tests like code:

• Everything lives in version control (like developers do — Git, for example).
• Tests run automatically on a regular basis (on every change to the project).
• There's a clear structure and architecture for the tests.

How to Improve the QA Automation Process

When a company with a growing legacy PHP application wants to add automated testing, that's a smart move for long-term stability. But you need to understand the situation fully — especially when working with engineers from other countries.

Hire for Seniority and Experience

Many companies still run older PHP systems. They are difficult to maintain and to test. Automating tests for this kind of code is hard. Even strong teams struggle with it.

What to do: bring in specialists with this background. These are test architects or senior automation engineers. They will write the tests you need, fix risky parts of the code, and set up a testing pyramid. Start with fast unit tests. Then add integration tests. Finish with checks of the entire system from start to finish.

When you choose a vendor, do not focus only on price. Experienced engineers with higher rates usually deliver faster and with higher quality. In total it costs less.

The size of a vendor does not guarantee the level you need. Big teams also include people without the right experience. Check candidates’ skills on your stack and real tasks.

Integrate QA and Engineering, and Communicate Frequently

Treat the overseas team as part of your organization. Give teams at least 3–4 hours of daily overlap so people can communicate live (video calls or messaging), resolve issues quickly, and help one another.

Use Slack or Teams for day-to-day communication and Jira or Trello for task and project tracking so everyone can see who is working on what.

Hold daily meetings that include offshore staff. This way problems come up right away.

Build a culture where team members ask questions and raise problems immediately.

Start Small

Big, old systems are hard to test all at once. Pick a smallest possible testable unit of your codebase that you can isolate and work with independently to start — one module or function — and ask the QA automation team to write tests for it. Take a look at what they've done, and if it's good, move on to the next stage. Doing it this way helps the QA automation team get the lay of the land, cuts down on bugs, and makes automation manageable.

Follow Standards

Outsourced test code often gets less scrutiny — fight that tendency. Define automation KPIs (coverage, reduction in production bugs, test stability) to keep quality front and center.

Measure outcomes — for example, by how many percent did critical production bugs drop after adopting tests?

Consider Nearshore Models

If experience with an Indian offshore team was unsuccessful, you can consider nearshore (for example, QA specialists from Eastern Europe).

Nearshore often provides a compromise: it's still cost savings, but time and cultural differences are smaller. For example, Poland has become a popular destination — Polish developers rank high in global ratings, speak English well, and are accustomed to direct communication that's closer to Western companies.

Of course, simply changing regions isn't a guarantee of success — you still need to choose a competent team, but if the Indian model isn't working, it's worth trying.

In any case, it's important to evaluate the nearshore team's past experience with legacy system automation and how well they know how to fit into your workflow.

How Belitsoft Can Help

Belitsoft is a custom software development company that provides QA automation & legacy PHP modernization services with senior SDET and PHP developers.

We help companies make their old PHP projects work better and easier to maintain.

1. Your code gets reviewed to find what is slow and what causes problems. Everything gets cleaned up. Unnecessary parts are removed and code becomes clearer. Adding new features becomes easier.
2. Testing gets set up so changes can be checked quickly and safely. Checks get automated so developers do not waste time on manual work. The system catches errors by itself.
3. The team works with yours. There is talking, advice, and sharing of knowledge. Results come fast and everyone stays comfortable.
4. Security stays strong. Customer data stays protected and processes follow the rules.

Belitsoft's senior test automation engineers do not just write many tests. They make your project stable, faster to update, and less of a headache for the business.