

Outsouce testing of hard to find bugs - tweiler

The CIO of my startup wrote to me "I think you are familiar with some startup blogs and forums", and asked if anyone has any experience outsourcing part of QA, at least for time-consuming hard-to-reproduce bugs.<p>We sell a data sync application, and in rare cases, it can cause data loss.  It is really hard to reproduce, but is possible.  It can take me 3 to 5 days to figure out the cause (usually a race condition or something like that).<p>We may or may not outsource this, just wondering if anyone has any experience or commentary on this situation.
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noodle
most of the QA team for my 9-5 is outsourced. what type of info are you
looking for?

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tweiler
Where do you outsource to? How is the QA doing? Are you a startup or bigger
company? Were there any growing pains associated with outsourcing the QA?

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noodle
an outsourcing company in india. QA is reasonable. larger company. growing
pains, yes.

in my experience, one of the bigger issues we have is with the staffing cycle.
the product is older and complicated. testing it isn't easy for someone
unfamiliar with the industry as well as someone who has english as a second
language. it takes time for any new team member to get adjusted.

on top of that, the turnaround on jobs in india is quite rapid, since their
tech industry is (or, at least, was) growing rapidly. so its a constant cycle,
new person -> learns -> experienced person -> quits -> new person

