TESTCo set an excellent precedent for attention to detail, clearly demonstrated the value of QA early in the development lifecycle, and emphasized the importance of setting quality goals that align with business objectives.
– Ella G., Cardata
The overall relationship we have with TESTCo has been extremely beneficial, and I feel like we have gotten great value from it.
It has always been difficult to work with offshore teams, as there has always been a communication issue, a time lag with communication, and difficulty understanding the product. The experience working with TESTCo team is anything but that; it’s been the opposite. Working with you actually makes us more efficient.
Having you on my team, working together and helping me reach my goals, is invaluable.
We were partners with another company that was providing us QA. They were clearly not prioritizing us for QA, and that caused us a bottleneck in QA. We were constantly waiting on QA rather than development. That was really slowing down our process, probably averaging 3 days, sometimes longer. As a result, I had to give my boss not very good answers, such as “The work is done, but we’re just waiting for someone else.”
Now that we are working with TESTCo, we feel like we are in a much better spot. I’ve been thrilled with TESTCo’s performance; since the first couple of sprints, it was clear that QA was no longer the bottleneck. Now we are receiving QA feedback in less than a day.
I also appreciate their flexibility; even when tickets don’t get to QA as fast as we wanted them to, we know they will be ready when we need them.
Kenneth P.
Tradeblock
We were about to launch, so we wanted to get it tested. Our main concern was figuring out what we were missing and coverage across browsers because that is a lot of work to get through. We have a small team, and the internal resources to test wouldn’t be testing full-time.
That’s why we reached out to TESTCo. You guys were thorough and very methodical. Proactively identifying issues, especially some of the security things. I feel pretty good about the help received, especially the feedback on test cases missing from our test suite. We want to do things very well, I think that was accomplished, and it also helps with the investors.
I can focus now on customer acquisition and customer satisfaction.
TESTCo allows us to work on multiple branches/versions of software without jeopardizing delivery dates communicated last year. With TESTCo team we are able to get better regression test coverage and have the team focused on priorities and high-risk items.
I appreciate all the work the TESTCo team has been doing. We would not be able to commit to the release schedule we have without your help.
Yelena G.
Salient Systems
We want to thank you for your services over the last 6 months. The UI, functional, and regression testing you’ve provided has REALLY helped us take this product to market.
TESTCo provided us with great service! We’ll reach out again for future needs!
A couple of years ago, we were forced to trim down testing resources, blocking our full velocity for new products or versions. The reduction in resources gated our ability to launch new products. Last year we got back on track with automated test maintenance and other testing best practices. Now testing is going well, and the regression cycle has been reduced. Shortening the regression cycle allows us to push more things out quickly and be more aggressive with the scope. Getting back on track with thorough testing through best practices allows me to ship my products with confidence in their quality, and that’s a great feeling!
On a recent bug that Stan found, his initial report contained enough information that developers would know how to replicate the bug. Without being asked, Stan then proceeded to dig deeper into the behavior to better understand it. His investigation and follow-up information turned the bug fix effort from potentially several hours down to less than five minutes. I am often quite impressed with the depth of Stan’s observations, but this one was so clear cut that I wanted to flag it.
When I took over product management at my small software start up, we had never employed anyone as a dedicated product manager. We had no QA process to speak of, and the company nearly went of business due to the costs of supporting a very low quality product release. QA was all ad-hoc and fell primarily to the engineers writing the code for bug fixes and new features. As part of establishing product management best practices, I started looking for a way to build out standard QA processes. Needless to say I was worried about the company as a going concern, and improving the quality of our products was key to righting the ship.We nearly went out of business due to the costs of a low quality release. First and foremost, I needed to make sure that future releases achieved some minimum viable level of quality. I also needed a process that was repeatable and that I could afford to carry out for each new release. So while quality was our biggest pain point, standardization and budget/affordability were also concerns.
We started out by hiring a QA resource in-house. Given our budget, we opted for someone without a lot of experience. This tester did a good job of getting us started on standardization of process, but we didn’t have enough capacity to get scalable standard tools and coverage to meet our minimum quality level. More importantly, training and replacement were huge obstacles, both in terms of time and money. When our tester moved on to another job, we had to practically start over when hiring a new tester to take the position, and we were essentially without QA throughout the new hire training period.
After having difficulty finding a good option for an in-house tester later, we did try to outsource QA with an offshore firm. While the offshore firm was affordable, we ended up getting nothing of value after working with them for about a year. The testers were not managed well, no one was expert enough to offer us best practices advice, AND the testers were not good at letting us know when they did not understand instructions.
In the end, we continued to limp along with Excel-based test cases that our in-house testers had developed. As product manager, I was spending over 50% of my time covering QA on my own. So it’s not a surprise that the rest of our product management efforts suffered. Then, we found TestCo. TestCo offered extensive QA process and management expertise, along with a flexible pool of testing resources, that allowed us to achieve our product quality goals within our budget constraints. I have more confidence in TestCo than any other partner I have ever worked with. I know that when I get too busy to monitor our QA activities, they can be trusted to keep QA running smoothly and make sure I’m aware of what needs my attention. I no longer have to worry about maintaining QA at some minimum acceptable level. I can look to the future and aim for top quality products, and TestCo will advise me on how to do just that.
TestCo, first and foremost, is my primary resource for QA best practices. They advise me on how to improve what we are currently doing, and they look for opportunities to expand our efforts to make the process more efficient and comprehensive. As part of the advising, they also do the hard work of finding the right resources for my projects and ensuring that they are fully trained to do the work. After the testers have been engaged for a project, they offer the additional benefit of experienced QA professionals who manage the team of testers.
All of these benefits allow me to focus on critical product management like building products that my customers want to buy! In addition to reducing our historical support costs by improving the quality of our product releases, they are also helping us to make our goal of continuous delivery happen. By shortening our test cycles with automation and plugging testers into the development process while new feature code is being written, we are expanding our ability to deliver value to the market faster and increase our revenue velocity as a result.
