here’s a lot of groundwork that needs to be laid before you can experience the full benefits of outsourced testing. Without proper preparation, even the best testers can face delays.

So while your internal teams may breathe a sigh of relief when you sign an outsourced testing contract— finally, they won’t be weeks behind their testing schedule; finally, they have the specialized help they’ve been asking for; finally, they have the confidence to ship new products at a faster pace — the truth is a signed agreement is just the first step toward relief.

To get accurate results, testers need to understand your product and testing process. To deliver those results in the format you want, they’ll need a login for your testing tool and a general walkthrough. To do the actual testing, they’ll need access to your sandboxes. And all of this also requires them to learn and adhere to your security standards.

If the proper groundwork isn’t laid, testing can be riddled with stops and starts, miscommunications, and inefficiencies — effectively eroding the benefits of outsourcing it.

The good news is that you can be proactive. We’re giving you a head-start, outlining the four major things to prepare when welcoming outsourced testers.

How to Prepare For Outsourced Testing Teams

To set outsourced testers off on the right foot, you’ll want to:

1. Nail Down Security in Advance

Testers see features that aren’t released yet and have access to tools that contain your company’s data and possibly your customer’s data. That means security needs to be taken super seriously — particularly if you’re operating in an industry that has extra strict rules (healthcare, banking, to name a few).

If you work at an enterprise organization, or even a mid-sized one, your company has likely hired external consultants before and has security policies in place.

• In this case, prep ahead of time. You may not be the only one who is enlisting the help of contractors next month or next quarter. Avoid any delays by logging an IT or InfoSec ticket early. Specify exactly what you intend your outsourced testers to do, what tools they’ll likely need access to, and what permissions they’ll need for each one.

If your company hasn’t hired outside talent before, you’ll want to:

• Get NDAs and other paperwork signed. Work with your legal team or outside counsel to cross all your T’s and dot your I’s — before any outsourced testers get added to your tools. Keep these agreements where you can easily pull them in case things go haywire.

• Follow Zero Trust security practices. This fancy cybersecurity term just means granting testers the minimum necessary access they need to do their jobs. Ideally, your testing tool and your sandboxes have role-based access controls (RBAC) to help you limit testers’ permissions based on their specific responsibilities. For example, if they’re only testing the Library module in a Partnership Relationship Management tool, just give them access to that module and others that connect or relate to it.

• Ensure secure data handling. Work with your CTO to develop and distribute guidelines for handling proprietary or sensitive information to your outsourced testing team. This could include requiring password managers, multi-factor authentication, antivirus, and other data masking procedures. As Redditor phillmybuttons highlights in r/SaaS:

“A text field is a breach waiting to happen, an uploaded file is like opening a door to your server. Use 2fa on everything related to your platform, from server logins to email services.”

• Lock down your sandboxes. Use anonymized data where ever possible and confirm that all of your test environments comply with relevant data protection standards, like GDPR or CCPA. Running manual or automated audits in these environments can surface any anomalous or prohibited behavior.

• (Possibly) enforce time-bound access. It may be overkill, but if you want to make sure all your bases are covered, you could consider implementing time-bound access to test and production environments. If you’re taking a session-based test management approach, this could feel pretty natural.

You might be in a rush to get all of this going, but make a point to write down the process so you’ve got at least a loose plan for onboarding additional outside testers or freelancers in the future.

2. Think Through Product Training

One of the benefits of outsourced testing is having a fresh set of eyes. But that doesn’t mean testers should go in cold turkey. That’s a recipe for missed bugs.

As Sick4Quality points out in the r/QualityAssurance subreddit:

“I’ve noticed this happens when the outsourcing team didn’t receive a proper training about the product, so they don’t know enough, or don’t feel comfortable enough with the product to report issues because they don’t know if is actually an issue or not.”

If testers don’t know how your product is supposed to look, react, update, [fill in other relevant verb here], they won’t know what’s in working order and what’s not. They can probably guess, but you’re better off not taking that chance. It could lead to unnecessary alarm. It could lead to repeat work — testers may have to recheck certain sections of your product because they misunderstood it. Worse, undetected bugs could get released to production.

So, before you bring on outsourced testers, you’ll need to determine the best way to give them the information they need without overwhelming or brainwashing them (after all, you still want them to be able to uncover the unknown unknowns).

If your company has a partner program or a really good new hire training, you may have some fantastic resources to tap into. Explore this first before creating your own material. Bonus points for any kind of tests or skills assessments — they show you that your testers actually paid attention in training and are ready to roll.

If you don’t have these at your disposal, here are some other ideas:

• Create interactive demos. An interactive demo is typically a set of screen captures that walks users through specific functionality, with tooltips and pointers for extra context on how it works. This can help testers understand what to expect when they actually get access to your product, and they’re simple to share — just send a link.
• Record videos. These days, there are so many tools available to record yourself walking through your product. And like interactive demos, videos are easy to share. Before you make your own, though, reach out to your product or customer success team. Even if you don’t have a formal training program, they often create videos for product marketing and onboarding, so you may not need to recreate the wheel.
• Host live demos. These are more hands-on and can be a pain to schedule, but they allow testers to ask questions in real time.
  Share a list of “gotchas.” Though testers should go in with an open mind, it’s a good idea to let them know where bugs are commonly found or edge cases to watch for. You might even note differences in performance on specific browsers or using specific hardware.

In r/softwaretesting, Redditor lilastoken suggests making a list of all problem features and properties:

“If it is a software component, I list all the variables it takes in and the variables that can affect its use - even time and geography can matter.”

Pro tip: Issues that frequently rear their ugly head in regression tests are probably good candidates for this list. And don’t forget: your product is always changing.

If your outsourced testers are staying on for a good chunk of time (say, a year), you’ll want to keep them updated of any changes you’re making. It could be a good idea to send them recordings of Product All Hands meetings, or even invite them to attend so they get the latest and greatest information.

3. Standardize the Testing Process

Outsourced testers — whether they’re an individual or work on a team — have their own way of managing testing. While their methods may match yours, it’s a good idea to level-set on:

• Features to be tested. Does that also include their interactions with other areas of the product?
• Method of testing. Are you asking testers to take an exploratory approach, or do you want them to use more prescriptive test plans you’ve written? Do they need to provide screenshots or other kinds of evidence?
• Role they’ll be assuming. Should they be impersonating a specific kind of user? If so, how should their testing change based on what that user is supposed to (or not supposed to) be able to do or see?
• Reporting. Will they need to use your QA tools, or can they use their own? Do certain types of bugs need to be escalated to support or engineering? If so, how?
• Communication. Will you be meeting with testers on a regular basis? How can they find product documentation? Who should they reach out to with questions?

Share your process ahead of time, store it in an easily accessible place like Confluence or Google Docs, and reiterate your testing protocols in standups with your outsourced testing team.

4. Get Testers Proper Product Access

Sounds easy, right? If you’ve been working in testing for a while, you know it’s not. Account and environment setup can be more time-consuming than you think. That’s because you need to:

• Define appropriate roles and permissions (in every environment). Some testers may need admin access in one sandbox and more restricted access in production. There could be lots of variations here, and you’ll want to test them out ahead of time.
• Create dummy data. Testers may need data to simulate real-world scenarios. And you don’t want to put any old data in your test environments. You want the data to reflect common user behaviors and edge cases, even if it’s fake.
• Configure integrations. If your product relies on third-party integrations or APIs, testers need access to those systems as well. This could mean providing API keys, sandbox environments, or test credentials — it just depends on how your product works, the scope of their testing, and your security standards.

Make your testing tool the easiest part.

Preparing for outsourced testers can feel like a lot of work — and it is. But it’s really in favor of testing quality and efficiency. Getting testers up and running with minimal disruption can mean better results in less time (and fewer worries related to security and compliance).

One way to accelerate outsourced tester’s time to productivity is to pick a highly flexible and intuitive test management tool. We have some inherent bias, but we think Testpad should be on your radar.

Testers of all kinds tend to pick it up quickly because it looks just like a checklist. You can also organize test scripts within specific folders or projects and tag them for your outsourced testing team to speed up your testing process. Plus, you can follow the team’s progress in real time with Testpad’s visual overviews and easy-to-pull reports.

Want to give it a whirl? Try it out — it’s free for the first 30 days.

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