Manual and Automated Testing to Cut Costs by 40% for Cybersecurity Software Company

The enterprise provides complex products that are customized individually for each client. After adding new features, the end products require performing regression software testing to ensure their flawless work.

However, the in-house development team had too much work to do. And gradually, ongoing regression testing turned into the key challenge for the enterprise. The product delivery critically slowed down leading to money loss.

In order to push forward the delivery of customized products, our Client contacted Belitsoft for QA staff augmentation services to hire the whole group of manual and automation testers for an ongoing period for performing software testing.

QA Software Testing Services We Applied

We opted for the combination of QA automation testing and QA manual testing to guarantee the top-tier result for our Client.

Automation testing was applied to execute more test cases in a short term, as this testing approach is much faster.

Manual testing was applied to ensure better UX and usability and find higher percentage of bugs.

From the get-go, Belitsoft's QA engineers helped enhance product quality through regression testing to offload the Client's engineers. That was supposed to help verify that a code change in the customized products didn't impact its functionality.

Later on, when we started to perform both development and testing, we applied some more types of testing services depending on each individual case. They included:

• Performance testing to test the response time, speed, reliability, and resource usage of an app under particular workload.
• Functional testing to determine if the software performs according to pre-determined requirements.
• Compatibility testing to ensure a product works properly across different OS, browsers, devices, networks, databases, and hardware.
• Cybersecurity testing to ensure that the software is invulnerable to potential attacks.
• Integration testing to evaluate the compliance of individual software modules in their combination with pre-defined functional requirements.
• Localization testing to check that a product has full functionality and usability in a particular locale/region.

Software Testing Tools We Applied

Creating a Well-balanced Dedicated Team of QA Engineers

Having evaluated the Client's requirements, we started to recruit a team from the local talent pool in Europe.

Why did the Client opt for hiring European specialists?

Reason 1. Testers in Europe are 2-3 times cheaper than in the local market.

Reason 2. We ensure high recruiting speed thanks to the vast available talent pool and our time-tested best practices. The core team of senior- and middle-level engineers was built in 3 months only, which is impossible for a local IT market.

Reason 3. Based on our years-long experience, we see that when working in outsourced teams, IT specialists tend to keep up with the latest technologies and skills to maintain the highest performance level.

As a result, the Client gets a highly skilled employee at a significantly lower cost in a short term.

How was the team built from scratch in a short term?

The team creation and augmentation was being performed step by step. Belitsoft had a pool of resources to recruit specifically for the Client's needs.

The team was gathered and started performing within 3 months. It included 10 QA automation engineers initially.

The first hires were of a senior and middle level. It was necessary to create a core of the team that could quickly grasp the project specifics and start to perform in the shortest term. They were technologically capable team leaders great at finding creative solutions and helping the team members to implement them.

After understanding the scope and difficulty of tasks facing the team, we started to add more specialists at the next stage.

According to our estimation, the project scope included a lot of tasks for middle- and junior-level engineers. Allocating the right people on the team and good managers to the project instead of searching for only senior-level engineers without verifying the real Client's need, allowed our Client to save the company budget.

The productivity of such a team has proved to be high at the cost cheaper than expected and the turnover lower than 5% for the last year of our cooperation.

Currently, the team of Belitsoft's QA engineers involved in the project equals 70 specialists of all levels.

The project is still in progress. Together with software testing services, our cooperation involves both customization and custom development for the enterprise. Read more about this aspect of our work in the full case study about our offshore dedicated team for a high-tech enterprise.