Ever wondered What Is QA as a service in today’s tech world? QaaS (QA as a service) is something new and extremely different for the quality assurance industry. It’s like a printer. It’s not just a black box that you buy from someone and start using it, then hope that it works. QaaS is an extension of what QA is to make sure that the product or application works as intended, no bugs or errors are present, and data integrity can be maintained.

What Is QA As A Service

It refers to some form of outsourcing the quality bit of your product or service, especially by performing defined testing processes. The initial idea for this strategy was first seen in the auto industry where QA (quality assurance) has been outsourced to other companies such as Delphi and Caliber Transmission.
QA as a service is similar to these examples, however, it is not limited to just car manufacturers. There are multiple types of QA, ranging from Quality Assurance Engineers (QAEs) who design test strategies and tools to Software QA Engineers (SQAEs) who write test plans and run automated tests.

QaaS in Software Testing

This means that the software company does not hire internal teams but instead works with an organization like AppPerfect and Test.io to provide the QaaS solution. We will look at some advantages of using a QaaS provider over having your own QA department later in the article.

Most QaaS providers do not have the size and scale of large companies such as Google or Microsoft. This means providing you with better service, higher quality of service, and more attention to your needs. A smaller company is able to devote more time to your requirements than a large organization because they are not working on projects for other clients at the same time. Depending on several factors, you can choose to decide whether to have a QaaS or simply an internal QA team.

QaaS providers can be very efficient, as they do not require a large number of internal resources to manage and operate a QA system.

Things to consider before having a QaaS approach

1) Costs

You need to decide how much you are willing to spend on QaaS and how much you want to spend.

2) Quality of service

You need to find a provider that is going to provide high-quality output for the requirements. You also need to know how much time the provider will take in your project as not all providers are alike.

3) Team size and scope of QA approach

You need a good quality assurance team depending on the number of applications you own and your company size but also depends on the amount of time you have. An average QaaS provider can test 5000 – 1000,000 applications within a month or so depending on the number of applications they have.

Let’s have a look at the advantages and disadvantages of QaaS

Advantages of QaaS

QaaS providers offer systems that are extremely flexible and scalable to meet the needs of an enterprise.

QaaS providers can provide QA on demand. This means that as your business expands, your QA department also grows to meet the demand. This helps you to expand at a much faster rate than if you were trying to maintain your own in-house QA department.

Disadvantages of QaaS

One of the biggest disadvantages is vendor lock-in. If you hire an internal team, they can be trained on your processes and guidelines, but if you decide to use a QaaS provider, it would be difficult to get them trained on how you want things done.

Conclusion

QaaS is a new concept that is revolutionizing the quality assurance industry. It’s very different from the way QA departments work today. Most organizations today still do not consider this method but they should because of the advantages that it offers. QaaS providers ensure better security, more reliability, higher levels of quality and more productivity than in-house testing teams can provide for their clients.

You might be interested in how to implement a QA flow in a sprint.