Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a team of human QA testers or you’re using one of the many automated testing solutions out there, the truth is this: if you have poor data seeding your QA strategy is going to suffer tremendously. If you do it properly, it enables you to run your whole test suite concurrently, keep your tests focused on the actual functionality they should be testing, and make maintenance easier.

Choosing the right QA outsourcing service isn’t just about considering the basics, such as their experience, certifications, and client feedback and reviews. You should evaluate their process for writing and maintaining tests, as this directly impacts your ability to ship fast and with confidence. From what we’ve seen, most QA outsourcing services use outdated, legacy frameworks like Selenium to write automated tests.

Engineering leaders usually outsource quality assurance (QA) to a software testing service to reduce developer workload, accelerate releases, and avoid the complexity of in-house QA teams. However, many engineering leaders mistakenly assume outsourcing automatically solves test creation and maintenance burdens and guarantees faster shipping. In reality, choosing the wrong service can exacerbate these problems.

Outsourcing quality assurance (QA) to a high-quality software testing service can be a good way to perform more testing at a low cost while freeing developers from test creation and maintenance. However, through surveys and interviews with numerous engineering leaders, we found that not all software testing services can deliver on these benefits. Many are notoriously slow and struggle to catch obvious bugs in critical user paths.

UI testing services can help teams ship code faster while ensuring no bugs immediately obvious to users make it into production. However, many testing services can’t deliver these benefits for various reasons (which we’ll discuss in more detail below), the main one being that their automated tests don’t validate an application’s UI directly, like how a real-life user would by clicking buttons, pages, form fields, and other UI elements.

When evaluating automation testing companies, you’ll notice most promise the same benefits: faster release cycles, fewer bugs in production, and less testing work for your development team. But in our experience, many fall short. They bottleneck releases, miss bugs users immediately notice, and still rely on your developers to write and maintain tests.

When evaluating a DevOps testing service, software teams should ask the following questions — it can mean the difference between quickly shipping high-quality code and bottlenecking releases, or having bugs slip into production: In this article, we review five top DevOps testing services, starting with our own, Rainforest QA. We show how we help teams ship high-quality code without constant bottlenecks dragging down the release pipeline.

Many teams outsource web application testing to ship faster and free developers from test maintenance — without the cost and complexity of hiring in-house QA engineers. The right web application testing service can deliver on that promise. But most don’t. Instead, they introduce new issues into the testing process: Before outsourcing, ask how their testing service tackles these seven issues. In this guide, we show how our web application testing service, Rainforest QA, solves these problems.

Functional testing services can increase test coverage and reduce the burden of test creation and maintenance on developers, allowing them to focus on coding new features and updates. However, during calls with prospects, we often hear about challenges with previous service providers. Namely, testing services that blocked releases, overlooked clear user interface (UI) bugs, and introduced new issues, such as poor communication due to language barriers and time zone differences.

Hiring a software testing company can be a good way to get more testing done without recruiting expensive, full-time QA engineers. However, through conversations with engineering leaders and developers, we frequently hear complaints about software testing companies bottlenecking release pipelines, missing apparent visual bugs, and highlighting non-issues as bugs.