Software teams have always felt under pressure to ship fast and ship clean. But now it’s worse. More complex, deadlines tighter, and organizations don’t accept mistakes. Doing all three of these at the same time can seem like an impossible challenge.
Managed Testing Services (MTS) are a way to do just that. An MTS provider takes responsibility for your testing with proven skill, automation, and processes while your team focuses on your product.
This blog will explore the role of providers of MTS services, the methods they use, and the benefits they provide.
Why Software Quality Is Harder Now
Technology now runs finance, healthcare, and entertainment. A bug in production costs dollars and your brand’s reputation. So the bar for quality keeps rising.
At the same time, teams face three constant pressures:
- Complexity: software applications require greater integration, platform capabilities, edge case handling, and other factors.
- Speed: Delivery timelines are shrinking, and there is limited time to detect bugs during testing.
- Cost: Developing an entire in-house testing team is costly.
MTS providers carry this load. They’ve got the tools, the process and the experts. Your team can outsource testing to an MTS provider without slowing the rest of your development process.
When Managed Testing Makes Sense
Managed testing is not the right call for every team. Here is how to tell.
Managed testing fits when:
- You are scaling fast and testing cannot keep up with release volume.
- You have no dedicated QA leadership in-house.
- You have an unmanageable load of releases that don’t have the staffing bandwidth.
- You have requirements for specialized testing (security, performance, compliance) that your engineers aren’t able to execute themselves.
- You want to free your engineers to build instead of test.
Building in-house fits better when:
- Testing is a primary focus of your product and you want great domain expertise on an ongoing basis.
- You have a predictable release schedule that is easy to resource.
- You have QA managers and proven testing practices.
Most teams fall somewhere in between.
A common setup is a hybrid one. Your in-house team owns testing close to the product. An MTS provider provides the scale and tooling for specialized testing and overflow.
Testing Methods MTS Providers Use
Two methods do most of the heavy lifting.
1. Risk-based testing
Different parts of the system have different risks. With risk-based testing, features are prioritized according to the impact of a failure. High-risk areas get tested first and tested hardest.
This leads to more thorough coverage in less time. The effort you spend testing makes the difference.
2. Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)
BDD gets stakeholders and testers to agree on acceptance criteria before testing starts. Everyone defines what “working” means up front.
This cuts down on misread requirements. It saves time as testing is done on the right things from the very beginning.
Automation in Managed Testing Services
Automation is where MTS saves the most time. Repetitive test cases run automatically across platforms and configurations.
Some commonly used tools are:
| Tool | Used for |
| Selenium | Web application testing |
| Appium | Mobile application testing |
| JUnit | Unit testing (Java) |
Automation tests are faster compared to manual testing. The costs will reduce in the long run. There is increased coverage. Resource spend is also reduced.
CI/CD integration
MTS providers plug automated tests into Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines. Every code change gets tested before it moves forward.
This is standard DevOps practice. Defects are identified prior to deployment into production. There are more frequent releases without fewer surprises.
Test Environment Management
Test results are only as accurate as the environment they test in. If the test environment isn’t similar to the real environment, the results will send you in the wrong direction.
MTS providers create and manage environments that simulate real-world conditions. They can do this with virtualization and containerization.
What this gives you:
- Testing for multiple OSs, browsers, and devices
- No need to buy physical hardware for each configuration
- Just-in-time scaling for when your project scales up
Performance and Load Testing
Software needs to hold up under real traffic. Performance and load testing are about testing an application to understand how it performs under the stress of many simultaneous users.
MTS providers use tools like JMeter and Gatling to emulate high-traffic loads and then identify:
- Slow response times
- Bottlenecks in the system
- Points where the application becomes unstable
Detecting problems at this stage is more cost-effective than cleaning up the mess in production. You fix problems before users ever see them.
Security Testing
Data breaches are very common. Astra reports a cyberattack happens roughly every 39 seconds, over 2,200 a day.
Security testing finds the weak points before attacks do.
MTS providers perform security testing, which includes penetration testing. They test the application as a hacker would, then tell you what may crash.
Identifying those weaknesses early and fixing them secures both your customers’ data and your name.
Why Managed Testing Services matter
MTS providers take testing off your plate , delegating them to experts. Your team continues growing. And testing will be carried out efficiently.
Here is what companies gain from working with an MTS provider:
- Testing takes place in parallel with no delays on releases.
- Increased test coverage ensures fewer defects.
- Problems with performance and security will be sorted out earlier.
- No necessity to establish a separate in-house testing team, so lower cost.
Tests have become increasingly complicated each year. For most teams, managed testing is a practical way to keep quality high without stretching the internal team thin.
Kualitatem provides managed testing services covering automation testing, performance testing, and security testing.
