You are looking to add people to your QA/Test engineering team; however you want to spend as little time as possible in choosing the right resources as this can be critical for organizational success.
You may have been in one or more of these situations before

• You started the hiring yourself but realized it takes more time (& therefore money) out of your schedules
• You find people, who join your organization, are cultural misfits or worse bad performers.
• You are looking for Test Interns/ QA interns to support your development efforts but do not know where exactly to look or how to assess them

How we help
Because we spent years in the QA/Testing space and we keep monitoring the industry expectations, we understand your job Descriptions to the T.
We start with understanding the Job Description, Salary range and Cultural Mapping by talking to you. This creates for us the exact specification that you want to hire for. This is followed by the below

• We look at our internal Database to see if there are resumes that fit your need.
• We do customized job postings on social media /Job Sites to receive suitable resumes
• We do an initial assessment (which is customized for you),of the shortlisted candidates to further prune the list. Normally after this step, we give you a list that is very much likely to fit your expectations. You spend less time in closing those positions.

Why does this work better?

Having had years of experience in building QA/test engineering teams helps. It simply works better because the initial filtering & screening is done based on a real assessment of the candidate’s fitment .It is affordable & Faster. Need we say more?

Have you at any point of time been in any one or more of these situations?

• Multiple new development projects requiring dedicated teams/resources
• You have a small QA team but you expect a surge/spike in Test Efforts at specific time durations; You want to augment your QA team for a certain duration to meet the timelines for your software releases
• You are a Startup-you do not have a dedicated QA team yet but feel an intense need for QA support
• Your developers are third party developers; you want the same structure for your QA team
• Software Maintenance is keeping your existing team busy
• You do not want to hire QA staff on a contract Basis
• You really believe that a third party independent QA team can add a lot of value to your development process.

Our 'Solutions Basket'

The below are an indicative mix of possible ways to deal with your needs. They are by no means comprehensive but we will be happy to custom design a 'Solutions Basket' for you based on deeper interactions

• Dedicated resources to augment your QA team
• A dedicated QA team for a specific project; they will work along with your Business analysts/Product managers, Engineering teams, Dev Ops and Customer Support
• Dedicated QA resources who will work with your third party developers
• QA Resources willing to work across time zones because your development work is across zones.
• Dedicated QA resources with domain expertise

The ‘Moving Parts’

• Assess Critical to Quality (CTQ’s) parameters & help Develop Comprehensive Test Plans & Test strategies and implement them
• Design & Develop Test Cases, Execute Test cases and Report defects, Track defects to closure
• Choose Regression tests to mitigate Risks –Your risks keep changing over time and the team needs to be responsive to recognize these and adapt accordingly
• Work with your engineering teams to decide when you are ready to ‘Ship’ -Testing needs to be finite
• Help in Root Cause Analysis –It does not make business or engineering sense to keep repeating the same mistakes

You are most likely to have been in one or more of the situations below,

• You are a software development company that has adopted an agile software development model but you soon realized that your ‘bucket’ of regression tests kept growing every sprint & soon became unmanageable to execute in the Sprint duration; you actually cannot fathom the quality of your software since you cannot run your regression tests effectively.
• Your top management decided to adopt Test Automation but you are still not able to reduce your test cycle times significantly. You may be dangerously close to giving up on developing Test Automation because it is not working for you
• You have an ‘Automation team’ but resources from this team constantly are pulled in for other work and you are not able to develop ‘sizeable’ amounts of Test automation.
• You have automated ‘scripts’ that need to be constantly maintained; you do not have the resources for the maintenance; hence they become unusable after some time.
• You have been testing your applications manually ,but you have realized that you need to build Test Automation to increase productivity & reduce your time-to-market
• You are a start-up ;You want help in setting up a Test Automation practice

Our 'Solutions Basket'

Developing a Framework for your Test Automation purposes is perhaps the most important step you can take for a successful Test Automation program implementation-Tools like Cucumber /Jbehave can be part of this Framework if you are using Behavior Driven development. The framework essentially defines the boundaries for reusability of code, Data Handling mechanisms, Reporting of Test Results, Extensibility and Maintainability of your scripts that make for a successful implementation of your Test automation goals.

• Help you do a Cost-Benefit Analysis for implementing Test Automation
• A dedicated ‘Test automation team’ that Designs & develops automated test scripts and optionally integrate them with your CI/CD pipeline
• End-to-End implementation of a Test automation practice for your startup
• Proof of Concept based on a new Test Automation tool that you want to implement
• Research & report on suitability of a new tool for your Test Automation purpose.

The ‘Moving Parts’

• We build frameworks based on industry standard best practices
• We typically use Selenium & Appium for Web/ Mobile application Functional Test Automation
• We can create automated tests for API’s
• We integrate these tests into your CI/CD pipeline

The Context and the Need

Consider these startling numbers!
With an approximate 3.6 billion users of smartphones worldwide by 2020 and this number set to grow to 4.2 billion by 2023, Android phones had a share of 71.1% and the IOS phones accounted for 28.1%.
The total apps on Play store were estimated to be 2,714,499 in 2019-20 and roughly, 3730 apps are added daily. Also apps keep removed from the Play Store or Apple store for various reasons, some of them with data breaches, security concerns and containing malware.

Add to this the 'device fragmentation' problem (9000+ distinct devices shipped with 21 + portioning system versions supported by 8 major browser engineers).If you are looking to reach a good segment of your target audience and impress them (and keep them impressed) ,you are looking at a category of tests which resemble the below

Our 'Solutions Basket'

The below are an indicative mix of possible ways to deal with your needs. They are by no means comprehensive but we will be happy to custom design a 'Solution basket' for you based on deeper interactions

• Dedicated resources to augment your QA team
• A dedicated QA team for a specific project; they will work along with your Business analysts/Product managers, Engineering teams, Dev Ops and Customer Support
• Dedicated QA resources who will work with your third party developers
• QA Resources willing to work across time zones because your development work is across zones.
• Dedicated QA resources with domain expertise

The ‘Moving Parts’

• Analyze & determine predominantly used Devices, OS versions if the mobile app already has a User base, else build a Matrix based on target user base and planned support for OS versions and browsers.
• Assess Critical to Quality (CTQ’s) parameters & help Develop Comprehensive Test Plans & Test strategies based on Categories of Tests to be performed (see above) and define Exit Criteria
• Design & Develop Test Cases, Execute Test cases and Report defects, Track defects to closure
• We use Real Physical Devices /Virtual Physical devices on the Cloud for Testing.
• We build test automation based on need & request. Appium is the tool of choice for Test Automation
• Choose Regression tests to mitigate Risks –Your risks keep changing over time and the team needs to be responsive to recognize these and adapt accordingly
• Complete Testing based on exit criteria
• Provide Test Metrics & Test completion reports
• Help in Root Cause Analysis –It does not make business or engineering sense to keep repeating the same mistakes

Over the last few years, the development & deployment of Web Applications / Mobile applications has moved from an On–Premise model to a Cloud–based model predominantly. With easy availability of infrastructure & scalability of hardware & software resources, the Cloud has revolutionized software development. Whether your development follows an On-Premise model or is Cloud–Based, you have to at some point of time have specific requirements that address the below parameters and measure them.

The tests seek to answer several questions ,for example a few of them are listed below

Is the product/software ready to be deployed on a production instance?

• What are the typical response times?
• Can the current response times be termed sluggish and can this lead to eroded brand value or loss of revenue over time?
• What is the throughput?

What kind of hardware (infrastructure) is required to handle peak load?

• What is the peak load and when is it likely to occur?
• What kind of servers are required to support this peak load?
• What kind of storage is required?
• Based on projected growth rate of users, will the system scale up to future demand?
• Are there any current scalability issues?

What are the current bottlenecks?

Our 'Solutions Basket'

• We will first understand your system architecture and test criteria thoroughly
• We will work with you to develop a 'Workload specification' to determine request types & frequency during Average & Peak loads
• We define the Metrics that are to be measured to make the performance testing relevant to your application & business
• We create a 'Measurement Specification' to determine how to get the correct value of the target metrics

The 'Moving Parts'

The below graphic explains the methodology we use for performance testing

• We set Performance test Goals and derive the Acceptance criteria working with your development/Performance engineers
• We build a Test Environment that is as close to the one that you will have in Production
• We design the Test cases and Build the automated Test Scripts using a load generator tool (Typically Jmeter)
• The Test scripts are run multiple times if required and test results are recorded
• A comprehensive report is provided for your Performance Engineering to take remedial action

You are designing and developing applications for the Web/Mobile.

• You do not know what kind of terrain the real world users live in. For all you know there could be people living in a mountainous region trying to access your mobile app (or for that matter in the basement of a building)
• You do not even know what kind of internet networks exist in different regions, or for that matter the kind of Cellular networks available.
• People use and expect all kinds of devices to be able to install and use a mobile app from. People are quirky about using certain browsers even on their laptop/desktops
• What happens when many people get onto your mobile app/web application all at once?
• Real people use your applications is different ways; you want to see what kind of usability issues you see when real users start using your applications.

Bottom line is you want to be PREPARED when your application ships, for most or all of these kind of situations. You can only achieve this through Crowd Testing or Crowdsourced testing.

Our 'Solutions Basket'

• We work with Crowdsourced Testing companies to identify a comprehensive user base that satisfies the prerequisites for ‘crowd testing’ your applications. These include understanding your target user profile, ethnicity, Regions where you expect the web/mobile traffic to come from, planned support for OS versions /Browsers/Mobile devices, the localization & Globalization requirements if any.
• The group of testers are vetted to ensure that they have the right skills & experience to test
• If you already have test cases, they will be used; otherwise, we will be happy to design them for you
• Test cases are executed and defects observed and logged on pre agreed forms by the crowd testers.
• Comprehensive Uniform bug reports from our side
• Accepted defects if fixed can be retested again by the crowd tester.
• If there are a special set of crowd testers that you desire (coming from a particular domain, or with a specific set of skills, etc…), we will be happy to work with the crowd service provider to arrange for them.