Offshore Dedicated Team of 100 QA Testers and Developers at 40% Lower Cost

The enterprise provides a series of complex products.

Offering a one-size-fits-all solution to a large variety of customers is a failing approach. The reason is the customers’ needs are equal only for the basic functions of the products. While for the rest of the functions, their requirements differ significantly. So it’s necessary to customize products for each customer individually.

As a result, the company faced a situation when it had a queue of orders for customization for years to come. It became clear that the in-house product development team could not cope with the workload; they needed a dedicated testing team.

And regression testing turned out to be the most pressing problem. The goal of regression testing is to eliminate the possibility of a software failure after the introducing a new feature. With a large product line, to which unique features are constantly added, you cannot expect that products will work flawlessly without regression software testing.

Hiring and Extending a Team of QA engineers To Test Customized Products

They were looking for offshore software development companies. The initial request to our software engineering company was to find offshore QA teams and create an offshore dedicated development team of 5-10 QA engineers, adding a few developers at the next stage.

Belitsoft gathered a dedicated development team of QA engineers by using time-proven best practices and expertise to save the Client’s budget. A step-by-step description of the testing process and results is described in the testing case study about Manual and Automated Testing for the company.

Setting up Effective Collaboration of the In-House and Remote Dedicated Teams

At Belitsoft, we not only know how to hire offshore testing team and create a strong offshore dedicated team but also can smartly build and manage the collaboration process to achieve significant results fast.

Our primary task was to optimize the workflow by building a software development team with the level corresponding to the top-skilled in-house specialists of the Client’s company.

To make the cooperation of the in-house and remote dedicated developers smooth and efficient, we performed a remote management consulting service.

We started to hire an offshore QA team. Our experts proactively took part in the communication and working processes with the purpose of setting a high employee retention level.

And we’ve succeeded with 85% of the team working for over 2 years till the moment.

As a part of our consulting service, we also analyzed the actual communication processes between the Client’s teams, recommended our best practices, agreed on how to implement them in the most effective way, and managed the process at every stage.

To deploy this plan, we’ve offered tools and a scheme for regular communication and management between QA teams (Jira, regular reporting, daily update calls, etc.).

Also, we’ve rolled out a well-thought hierarchical structure of the teams, which is essential for high efficiency.

The entire process is absolutely transparent to the Client.

Based on this method, we’ve arranged a productive working process between teams that have been successfully working for the last 2 years.

Hiring and Extending a Team of Dedicated Developers To Customize Products

Having evaluated the professional approach and skilled employees of Belitsoft, the leaders of the enterprise entrusted the customization of their products to our team.

The product line was expanding and getting increasingly popular worldwide, leading to a very large workload of in-house developers.

In the end, the timely development of products (Java, Python) became a bottleneck for our client. The in-house developers had to prioritize their tasks, often putting away large time-consuming ones.

The client needed dedicated developers of a certain level and expertise. We helped them add the right talents to the team to increase productivity immediately.

Initially, dedicated developers integrated into existing products. They helped to finish writing a code and to rework a program.

After successfully working with several departments, the Client entrusted Belitsoft to write new projects with their in-house developers. For this, we agreed it with the Client to create micro-teams of 3-5 people.

The team mainly comprised remote developers. From the client's side, there was a person who helped with tasks, for example, a product owner.

The team's boost has enabled developers to finish all the projects on time now.

Thanks to our Client, the developers from Belitsoft have received the project expertise by doing everything from scratch.

Setting up the 2-Week Onboarding Practice

Due to a specific knowledge domain, it could cost our Client from 2 to 4 months to put a new hire into the process and get the expected results.

Evaluating the large scope of work at the start of our cooperation, we realized the importance of effectively organized onboarding to reduce the time of integration of new hires to 2 weeks.

There are best practices for effective onboarding, such as the application of the knowledge base, the project management tools (Jira), and source code management tools (GitHub).

We created the knowledge base. Now there are the documents for every team, and a mentor provided by Belitsoft.

As a result, a new hire can get timely and valuable advice. And the onboarding of new employees now takes 2 weeks only.

The Final Structure the In-House & Dedicated Teams Use Till Today

The remote dedicated team by Belitsoft has a well-thought hierarchical structure:

• the head of the department
• team leads (one for each team)
• dedicated developers and QA engineers
• representatives of the Client in each team

We helped our Client to build the correct hierarchical structure as well:

• the department head collaborates with us
• competent team leads have joined the company

Our specialists have also fine-tuned the working process.

1. The teams use Jira to create projects and assign tasks.
2. The assignees employ Jira to accept tasks and track their work log and progress.
3. We divided tasks into sprints (2-week terms).
4. The PM / Scrum Master / Team Lead takes responsibility for the project and encourages deeper communication within a team.
5. Weekly reporting is performed.
6. We ususally arrange short daily calls for a quick update.