Economic Downturn 2023: Strategies to Handle the QA Team that Help to Survive and Thrive
Strategies for preparing your quality assurance team for the economic downturn.
An economic downturn significantly impacts all business aspects, including sales, customer loyalty, competition, loans, investments, and others. In many cases, companies failed to adapt to the changes that came into effect at lightning speed. Ran Rachlin, CEO and founder of Ubertesters company, shares strategies to survive the next economic downturn around the corner.
The last global recession lasted from 2007 to 2009. Thousands of companies faced significant losses during this period, while many became bankrupt.
But why should you think about the risks of a new crisis now? According to a recent article published by TechCrunch, the world will likely soon face a new, deeper economic downturn, starting from 2022-2023. If you are a company owner, CEO, board member, or manager of a small business, it’s time to prepare for the hard times in the global business environment. How can you prevent severe losses for your company? What are the most cost-effective solutions to survive and thrive? Let’s find out the answers.
Preparing for the Economic Downturn: Best Strategies
So, like many other companies, your business is at risk of diving into the world of a massive recession. The good news is that there are many proven methods to minimize the risks of losing income and market shares. Any CEO must be prepared and create in advance a well-planned contingency plan as part of the organization’s risk management strategy.
Improving financial management
These are the basic strategies aimed at cutting expenses. The business should monitor cash flow, review outstanding loans, and regularly review fixed and variable costs. If you have some planned optional activities, switching to only mandatory ones might be good. Many businesses also reduce their rented space and decrease Capital Expenditures. Lastly, you should carefully review the Selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expenses. This is one of the first places to deeply analyze the costs and look for ways to make cuts.
Optimizing the head-count
Human capital is one of a company’s largest expenses. Optimizing the head count remains a common method for many businesses to overcome temporary economic difficulties. The plan should start with modifying employees’ compensation plans, benefits, and bonuses, even if only temporarily. Then, the next step is looking at workforce reductions. The most effective alternative, in this case, is shifting more activities to offshore outsourcing companies. Start with outsourcing the non-core activities that are not strategic to the business. This solution will allow you to get the help of professionals right when you need it and save costs. By the way, the most frequently outsourced field within the engineering department is using offshore software testing (QA).
Ensuring shipshape consolidation
Carefully considered consolidation is another measure that can allow your business to survive in the new reality. However, it is crucial to be attentive to agreement conditions and other aspects when signing the deal.
Streamlining products and services
Any company usually has products that hit the market and gained popularity along with less successful options. When it comes to thriving in an unstable economic environment, reviewing all the products and services your business provides is better. This will help you detect the least profitable or the struggling ones and close them for a definite period (or forever) while you will have a chance to focus on the most promising ones.
Enhancing the customer experience
There is nothing new that having countless happy customers will lead your company to success. Many businesses focus on enhancing customer experience during challenging periods to attract more clients to their products or services.
Optimizing top company niches
Software QA is a time-consuming and expensive process that usually requires hiring numerous testing professionals. If you have in-house quality assurance professionals, you will also need to keep up-to-date and buy the latest tools, devices, and technologies for performing tests. All these aspects significantly increase business expenses. Furthermore, many experts don’t consider QA as a core activity. QA involves less intellectual property. Thus, it is easier to outsource. Consequently, software testing outsourcing is one of the most effective ways to optimize a company’s spending.
Reducing testing costs
There are several proven ways to reduce testing costs you might need to know. If you are looking for a win-win way to reduce your testing expenses, combining the methods mentioned below is better.
For your convenience, we divided all solutions for reducing your testing costs into two groups. The first group contains the most proven and effective ways to achieve this goal by reorganizing your QA team structure, while the second one represents some supplementary efforts for a more budget-friendly testing process.
See More: How AI Can Help Address the Talent and Skills Shortage
Primary Methods for Reducing Your Testing Expenses: How to Restructure Your QA Head-count
1. Have an experienced in-house QA lead
Don’t compromise on having your own in-house QA team lead that will create the strategic vision for the QA department. An experienced QA lead can boost the effectiveness of your company’s testing processes. Of course, hiring a true professional is usually pricey, but this measure is still worth it. Moreover, a QA lead who interacts internally with the engineering team while working together with a skilled offshore testing team can bring your testing processes to a brand new level.
In other words, hiring an experienced QA lead along with a highly-qualified offshore team and crowd-testing experts can often do wonders.
2. Hire an offshore engineer/outsource remote team
Outsourced software testing is the most cost-effective solution that is used by thousands of big businesses and startups. The reason is that it allows companies to optimize their expenses most easily and conveniently while reducing the headcount.
First, using an outsourcing partner requires less time than hiring QA professionals. You don’t need to spend days and weeks searching for a pro with relevant experience, arranging interviews, and onboarding process.
Second, offshore testing will help you receive top-notch quality services with no need to spend costs for searching and hiring QA professionals.
Third, it gives you more opportunities to focus on more important business goals and core activities. Thus, your company gains more competitive advantages and starts covering a larger market share.
3. Initiate a partnership with a crowd-testing service
Crowdsourced software testing is an excellent option for those companies that develop products and services for users located in different countries. The truth is that automation and buying the newest testing tools will still not allow you to test your digital product on real devices in various locations.
Economic slow-downs usually occur fast, while their results might be unpredictable. In order not to stay behind, any company should take care of its performance during these demanding periods in advance. Strategic thinking and planning might appear to be helpful in this situation.
The same rule works for QA planning. If you want to ensure your company will overcome all the difficulties, remain competitive, and even boost its profits during the global recession, it is crucial to find a trustworthy outsourced crowd-testing partner. As a result, you will benefit from having a well-performing QA process and flow and meeting all the testing tasks. Your products and services will be launched in a flawless manner, while you will save costs.
4. Start testing early
Another solution from our hotlist of ways to reduce testing costs is launching your QA procedures early. As a rule, this solution might help you avoid costly mistakes and errors in the future.
All the bugs, faults, and crashes should be fixed in the early stages of the development process to avoid facing severe issues before the release.
See More: How Digital Transformation Impacts Technical Skills Gap
Secondary Methods for Cutting Your QA-related Costs
There are some additional ways to decrease your QA expenses that most companies already know about. Although they are good enough, these methods will not likely provide you with such impressive results as the primary ones.
To put it short, it is highly recommended to focus on making your team more effective with offshore and crowd-testing, as well as initiate your QA processes as early as possible. After that, it’s time to use some extra solutions below.
- Increase the number of testing tools: Buying the newest testing tools and technologies is a pricey decision, but it can help you reduce your costs in the long term. The reason is that modern software will likely provide you with more precise testing results, as well as detect and fix bugs faster.
- Use automation: Automating some of the stable and repetitive tests might significantly decrease your expenses. Automation eliminates the number of tests performed manually, speeds up the entire testing process, and frees up the hands of your QA professionals for more important tasks.
However, not all the QA processes can be successfully optimized. Moreover, quality assurance still requires supervision, precise management, up-to-date tools, and testing on various types of devices. The situation becomes even more complicated if your product is targeted to a wide audience located in different countries. This way, crowd-sourced testing might be the most effective solution to accompany your automation efforts.
What QA-related strategies are you implementing to prepare for the economic downturn? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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