Every software development company requires testing of their software regularly. This can either be done by using inhouse expertise or outsourcing to a software testing company. Many people outsource software testing.
The main difficulty in outsourcing lies in finding the proper software testing company. One of the most important processes in the software development life cycle is software testing. This is essential in the development of efficient software.
Many people consider this as the most important phase in the development life cycle. The future of software developing company mainly depends on the software testing company. Hence, the company chosen must be economical, efficient and reputable. Further, they should offer the services that guarantee the safe and efficient release of software for marketing.
Because of technological advances there has been a boom in the software development and to service the software development companies a large number of software testing companies have come into being throughout the world and there is acute competition between these companies to get maximum business for software testing.
They will publicize in such a way to create an impression that they have their best product. Hence, you should be very careful in your selection of software testing company. You must ensure that you employ a software testing company that offers testing services to your requirement and the cost should be competitive/ economical.
The following are the factors that you should look for while selecting the software testing company.
The testing company should validate and verify all of your software applications, software products, web sites and any web related applications.
Software is a resource and thus must be given appropriate security. Software also contains and controls data and other resources. Any business, large or small will be having costly software resources which need to be protected. Software should be designed to operate at a level of security testing that is consistent with the potential harm that could result from the loss, inaccuracy, alteration, unavailability, or misuse of the data and resources that it uses, controls, and protects.
The software testing company engaged by you should assist you in having a security testing abilities to protect your computers from security threats like data theft, data corruption, which would result in downtime for your company.
Performance testing is one of the important software testing types. The term Performance testing is often used interchangeably with ’stress’ and ‘load’ testing. Many testing companies offer only stress testing as a part of their performance testing.
In software engineering, performance testing is defined as testing that is performed, to determine how fast some aspect of a system performs under a particular workload. It can also serve to validate and verify other quality attributes of the system, such as scalability, reliability and resource usage. A good software company, in addition to stress testing should provide the complete testing cycle including strategy, planning, test management and generation, execution and reporting of all test results for the life of the software.
The functional testing covers installation tests, Regression testing, upgrade and backward compatibility testing, accessibility testing, internationalization and local testing, API testing and testing of user interface, database management, security and networking. The testing provided by your software testing company should be thorough and complete and include all the testing processes given above.
They should also test the software for functions such as user commands, searches, user screens, integrations and data manipulation. The regression testing is an important feature since it is very useful to test software automatically after corrections are made. The functional testing gives results equivalent to a good "satisfaction guaranteed or your money back" policy. The functional testing should be efficient and cause least downtime.
The software testing company you are proposing to engage should help in automating the testing process on your request. Many companies do this voluntarily. It may not be possible to test everything on the software; but a good testing company will be able to provide a proper risk assessment.
Risk assessment is the first step in a risk management process. Risk assessment is the determination of quantitative or qualitative value of risk related to a concrete situation and a recognized threat. The risk assessment given by the software testing company will forewarn you on the possibility of occurrence of a problem on the software and also steps to be taken for eliminating such problems.
In order to choose good software company you should also get references from the sister business companies which have used the services of the software testing and quality assurance company. Alternately you can also check reviews about the company’s credibility and performance.