As I look to stand up a testing department at my current company, one of the items that I am considering is should I have an outsourced testing department. There are a few items that are at play which are making me consider that managed testing services would be a viable option. First, my company is located in a city that does not have a whole lot of companies that heavily rely on technology. The city is a decent size with approximately 250K people but it has terrible schools and the city is relatively stagnant in terms of growth. I have been trying to directly hire people who are experienced, especially in the area of QA Directors and QA Managers but it is proving to be very difficult. It also appears that the IT sector is starting to grow, so it is becoming more difficult to find and hire top talent. I am thinking that I can initially have an outsourced testing department and get it up and running for a few years, then see if I can move the testing organization to be an internal department. This approach would allow all the processes and procedures to be established by people who are experienced with software testing. I am in the process of creating a QA RFP in order to find out if that is an option that makes sense for my company.
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