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.

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).

We may or may not outsource this, just wondering if anyone has any experience or commentary on this situation.

[noodle]

most of the QA team for my 9-5 is outsourced. what type of info are you looking for?

[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?

[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