Outsourcing Testing and QA

Much like many industries in the world, looking to increase profitability means outsourcing of jobs to cut costs.  In many cases this is feasible but I believe that in the case of software development it is very inefficient and would eventually undermine the initiative that was to cut cost in the beginning. 


As stated in Markus Gärtner's article, "quality involves many different things to different people" and with the sensitivity of source code being outsourced, you either have to subject the assurance to a lower level of confidence that could be given through black box testing, or you can elect to allow white box testing, and hope that your source is in safe hands.  He also brings up a interesting point when you factor in the customer.  You levee a certain amount of control to this outsourced company if that was the path taken, this weakens your image when facing the customer.  The perfect example involves discrepancies between the customer and the quality assurance team.  The original company would be at a loss, acting as a middleman between the customer with needs and the assurance team with the answers.  I believe this can be somehow feasible in an ideal environment given a small program being outsourced, but this is surely an unlikely scenario.


This does lead to an interesting aspect in outsourcing where the company could actually benefit from this.  If one was to consider comprehensive testing is done in house coupled with some outsourced usability testing, this would prove to be a useful since outsourced usability testing has proven to be the most effective way to gain from usability testing, even though that usually means an in-house usability testing team.


After all of this put into consideration I would say that outsourced testing and quality assurance is not an advisable route considering multiple factors.  If a software solution was outsourced for quality assurance then the founding company is lessening their power through a vested trust in their quality provider.  Certainly this may work with particular trustworthy entities that do this line of work, but I believe that in many cases the amount saved is not worth the hassle or risks of outsourcing a product.  Currently we see the repercussions of the repercussions of internal quality assurance, meaning that business decisions were initially made to relocate jobs overseas when internal quality assurance was found to be too expensive but this trend is now reversed in time.  Consumers started to become averse to outsource tactics mostly because it made them frustrated, which opened up the door for a quality assurance movement back to their original sources.  This is more evidence that outsourcing of crucial functions within a company is bad practice, and that even though this experiment with cost cutting was failed, this shows that the quality of a unified system prevails over a separation of powers.