Where can I outsource Software Testing?

Outsource it to me, or to another US resident who can actually do the testing. ;-)

Yes, but ask yourself why you would want to.

The tester has to know your business as well as you do – even better, to make the testing realistic in terms of the mistakes users would make. That’s probably a job better done by people who know how your customers operate.

That’s why you’d want to hire a company like my previous company, or someone like me, where we are very good at understanding the needs and requirements of our customers, as well as what might need to be tested, and other technological aspects.

Although, often what’s needed to find non-obvious bugs are testers who are not thinking like you or your customers, and who don’t understand what you were thinking or expecting, and will try things you wouldn’t think of.

@Zaku we outsourced development to India for a while (terrible experience) and testing to Mexico (mostly awful) and after a couple years brought all back in house.

There seem to be very different cultural expectations, communication styles, agreements, understandings, relationships to responsibilities and deadlines, upsets and anxieties, and other details of business relationships in different countries.

I’m currently giving up on a brief attempt to work with a company that has mostly native South Asian tech support. The previous company was American with hit & miss American tech support, who when you got someone clueless, they’d tend to stress out at the idea of not knowing what you needed, and often invent ridiculous lies they didn’t realize were obviously lies. The new company’s South Asian tech support mostly don’t seem to lie, but they will casually repeat useless answers they’ve given before, while keeping an air of “this is fine” while not doing anything that will ever lead to a solution in any way. Two nights ago, one of them said they were “escalating” my issue to “Priority Support”, which I mentioned to others on the team yesterday, but so far no sign of that. I’ve told them I’m completely blocked several times, and their latest offer of help is “You can let us know if you need any assistance.”

At least I’m convinced now there’s no question that we need to go with a company that has actual good tech support, even if it costs 20 times as much (for that service – the total costs of all the problems are far more).

@Zaku, I was hired once as a contract beta tester of one of the earliest spreadsheet programs developed in Silicon Valley. The supervisor handed me a list of fourteen steps to set up the software and left me to it.

A little while later I reported back that I’d had a total crash.

Bewildered, she looked down at the list of steps she’d given me and said, “What did you do?”

I said, “I did the last one first.”

She was stunned. “Why did you do that?”

My husband always said that as a beta tester, I was a natural.
 

I say that any system designed on the assumption that everything will go the way it’s supposed to is doomed to fail.

The programmer should not be trying to predict and trap for every error the user might make. It doesn’t take much of a leap to get outside that circle and into the programmer’s major blind spots. So I agree that you want a tester who doesn’t share the programmer’s mindset, or at least knows how to shed it while testing.

Haha! Yep, exactly. I often use my mom as a tester – she can/will break just about anything, and often right away, without really trying to.