QAwerk

QAwerk is a software testing and QA agency established in 2015. We specialize in manual and automated testing of SaaS products, meaning we help businesses test front-end, backend, mobile apps, and APIs.

We help midsize companies and startups like Unfold, Evolv, and Zazu achieve exponential growth by thoroughly testing their software, seamlessly integrating with their internal teams, and serving as a tech advisor sharing the commitment to the product’s long-standing success. Thanks to prioritizing software quality, Unfold, for example, managed to transform their simple, often crashy story maker into a powerful, one-billion-user platform recognized by Apple, Google, and Squarespace.

So far, QAwerk has helped over 300 products globally enhance their software quality and eliminate costly bugs. While QAwerk is a relatively young company, our expertise and steady progress are recognized by reputable tech media, such as The Next Web and TechCrunch.

Our testing team has also gained solid experience in testing mobile games and penetration testing. We grow organically and continuously explore new niches to expand our expertise and provide additional value to our clients.

Giving back to the broader tech and business community is another crucial part of our work. We contribute by testing software for free and showcasing the bugs we managed to find, often of critical, high, and medium severity. We call it Bug Crawl, and anyone interested in the initiative can participate and request free testing in exchange for being featured on our website. Bug Crawl is the best fit for companies who’d like to receive an unbiased opinion on their software quality from an independent tech expert and compare their internal bug reports with ours in terms of their depth, types of the issues found, and severity of those bugs. Bug Crawl is also highly beneficial to startups with limited QA resources and lax testing processes as it is their chance to spot critical bugs and redesign their testing strategy.

In 2020, we released Bug Hunter, a mobile app designed for Android app developers, testers, and UI/UX designers. It addresses the numerous challenges of manual testing of Android apps, such as the high granularity of Android OS versions, the multitude of screen sizes and resolutions, and hardware differences. Bug Hunter’s mission is to ease the lives of manual testers by reducing the amount of repetitive and monotonous work and eliminating the need to use multiple apps to verify the accuracy of UIs under test.

As a Founder and CEO, my primary task is to ensure that each department is fully operational and that any arising issues are dealt with efficiently and promptly. I equally care about the happiness & success of my clients and the happiness & well-being of my team. I believe in happy employees bringing their best selves to work, translating that into the projects they are working on, and positively impacting our clients’ businesses.

I am a software engineer turned entrepreneur, so I continuously master new skills and dive deep into less technical stuff like sales, marketing, and SEO to delegate, improve existing workflows, and effectively communicate with non-techies.

Software testing is an indispensable part of any development project. You can’t write the code once and expect it to miraculously work for the years to come. Any kind of software requires continuous, comprehensive maintenance, and professional software testing is what keeps it running.

Especially nowadays, when it feels like new frameworks appear every day, browsers become more advanced, and the SDLC is reduced to keep up with the competition. Frequent releases are no longer an advantage, rather a must-have, proof your product is legit, secure, and consumer-friendly. All these factors prompt businesses to race and deploy apps and features sooner than they’re actually ready to be taken to market. More so, when combined with overwhelmed in-house QA teams, this becomes a recipe for disaster.

My solution to the dilemma above is outsourcing software testing and basically killing two birds with one stone - you save both money and time. While the idea of outsourcing is definitely not new or unique, the way it is implemented is what makes it distinct.

I wanted to make a cooperation with QAwerk comfortable for a broad audience - small companies, well-established businesses, outsourcing pros, outsourcing rookies, technical founders, as well as non-technical entrepreneurs. To achieve that, I clearly outlined what we do and what we don’t. For example, we do provide our clients with independently managed QA teams, we do monitor the workload of our QA engineers, their progress, and prepare monthly reports highlighting our wins, areas for improvement, and ways to maximize our results. On the contrary, we don’t work with freelancers, we don’t do mere outstaffing, and we don’t overpromise.

QAwerk software testers can handle an entire software testing life cycle or take over its specific part - be it test planning, test case development, or test execution. We rely on our hands-on expertise, leverage the power of battle-tested testing tools & frameworks, and use modern testing methods to carry out full-scale testing of our client's products.

Having the right team is what distinguishes successful service agencies from outsourcing failures. I’ve always wanted to have full visibility of each project, build transparent relations with clients, and maintain the reputation of a trusted advisor. For that, one needs an in-house team of seasoned professionals; you can’t achieve the same results with freelancers.

QAwerk has 2 offices in Kyiv and Zaporizhia, Ukraine. For clients’ projects, we hire only middle and senior software testers to provide fast onboarding, good speed of testing, and consistent quality results. This approach not only safeguards us from failures but also helps reduce employee turnover as experienced QA engineers don’t get distracted by mentoring and managing juniors. We may hire a junior only for an internal project.

We are remote-first; however, we can travel to your location and work on-site should you have such a preference. Our geographical proximity to Western Europe allows us to work with European clients with no or minimal time difference. At the same time, our clients from North America, New Zealand, and Australia can benefit from the time-zone gap with Ukraine by ordering overnight testing - what used to take 3 days can be done in 2. In essence, overnight testing works like this: your developers write code and go to bed; it’s daytime in Ukraine, so we take that code and test it while your team sleeps; your developers see bug reports and feedback on the quality of their code first thing in the morning.

We found one more solution to minimizing feedback-related delays. If the project is well-documented, we can start working on feature testing even when the feature is still under development. We scrutinize the requirements, outline missing information, clarify assumptions,  and write test cases. This way, when the build is ready for testing, our QA engineers waste no time on communication and get to the practical stuff right away.

By the way, whenever you happen to be in Ukraine, come visit our offices to meet the team in person, learn more about our culture, and simply have a good time. We love having guests around.

The IT services market in Ukraine is growing at breakneck speed. In 2020, it reached $5 bln, surpassing the export of transport and gas transit services. Therefore, it is only natural that more and more tech agencies are appearing on the IT scene.
 

Here is what sets us apart from similar vendors:

Since 2015, we’ve tested over 300 projects, among which are web, desktop, mobile apps, SaaS platforms, and games.

As for long-term projects, we have worked with businesses in the Workforce Management, Digital Growth, Media & Entertainment, FinTech, E-Commerce, E-government, E-learning, and GameDev industries.
 

Our Bug Crawl initiative allows us to tap into new niches and fully prepare our software testers for new projects coming in. Among the 200-plus Bug Crawl participants are:

•    Workplace productivity platforms & BPA solutions like Hive.
•    Marketing SaaS like Mailmunch.
•    CRM software like Zapier.
•    E-readers like Chegg.
•    Mental health apps like Smiling Mind.
•    Fitness apps like MyFitnessPal.
•    Video communication tools like Loom.
•    Music marketplaces like Cosound.
•    Social discovery apps like F3.
•    Food delivery apps like Postmates.
•    E-learning apps like Coursera.
•    Digital wallets like YouGo.
 

This list is by no means exhaustive as we test new products weekly.

As for our client retention rate, “repetitive” is not quite applicable to the software testing agencies. Quality assurance is tied to software development, and the latter is never a finished process. Also, there is no final software in the modern-day world. Every day there are updates and new versions of operating systems, libraries, browsers, devices, screen resolutions, etc. So even in the unlikely scenario your software is bug-free today, tomorrow it will have bugs when something is updated. Therefore, we measure our success not by the repetitiveness but by the lifespan of our partnerships. And yes, about 65% of our cooperations with clients is long-term.

Most of our prospects, whether they’ve tried outsourcing before or not, share the same problem - lack or complete absence of QA resources. While not every project requires all types of testing to ensure decent product quality, having a tech partner who can cater to all of your testing needs is a pleasant bonus. Here are some of our in-demand services:

•    Manual testing
•    Test automation
•    Functional testing
•    Regression testing
•    Performance testing
•    Usability testing
•    Accessibility testing
•    Cross-browser testing 
•    Integration testing
•    System testing
•    User acceptance testing
•    Security & penetration testing
•    API testing
•    Cloud testing

Clients who've worked with us for some time and witnessed our diligence tend to expand our area of responsibility. For instance, Evolv initially hired us to conduct manual testing only but soon entrusted us with automated testing too. Unfold has long delegated the entire software testing life cycle to QAwerk, giving us the utmost freedom in doing what we love and know best.

As a service agency, QAwerk is, of course, customer-centric. Considering that we get 70% of our leads by word of mouth, I guess our customer satisfaction rate is pretty decent. We’ve come a long way to understand what keeps our clients happy. I’m not talking about the basics like being transparent, meeting deadlines, being able to deliver what’s been promised, being available, and so on.  These should be provided by default.

Cooperating with QAwerk is, first of all, comfortable. We’ve worked on Scrum, Kanban, Lean Development, and Waterfall projects using a multitude of tools: issues trackers like Jira, Azure DevOps, and Asana; test management software like CucumberStudio; CI/CD tools like Bitrise, mobile app testing tools like TestFlight. Such familiarity with some of the most popular software for testing and development allows us to be onboarded fast and get along with the client’s internal team from day one.

Secondly, we respect our clients’ communication style. We have clients who are email gurus and prefer communicating mostly in a written form, and we get that. Not every conversation requires a call, and we all know Zoom fatigue is real. On the other hand, we have clients who prefer to communicate via video calls and who’d rather over-communicate than miss out on important details. And we have no problem satisfying the latter request as well.

Lastly, when we ask our prospects what they value most in a vendor, they all seek and agree on one thing - reliability. It’s not the cost that makes them doubt; it’s the lack of trustworthiness, lack of social proof that this cooperation will be successful. In turn, we can provide a guarantee that everything will go smoothly since we’ve done it before, received numerous words of appreciation for our work, and brought tangible results to our clients.

As I mentioned before, we provide the client with a team, and each team at QAwerk has a dedicated PM/BA overseeing the project progress.

Our project managers are our clients’ major points of contact who address their queries, escalate issues or requests to developers, and clarify any kind of miscommunication. They make sure we have a clear-cut vision of our client's immediate and long-term needs and prioritize tasks accordingly.

This approach frees up our clients from a large chunk of administrative work as they don’t have to micromanage and monitor the performance of individual QA engineers. Instead, they focus on their most critical, revenue-generating tasks while our PMs handle the team, balance workload, and prepare monthly reports.
Another crucial part of our support system is taking over all the documentation work. Before starting a project, we test the documentation for completeness and accuracy and expand it if needed. Suppose the project is not documented at all. In that case, we’ll create everything from scratch - starting with a test strategy, test data, and test plans and finishing with test scenarios, test cases, use cases, bug reports, and test summary reports. Our QA engineers and PMs are skilled in technical writing, so we keep all project materials crisp and clear throughout the entire STLC.

Living in a fast-paced world, we all need a framework that would address the need to incorporate changes to requirements, new client preferences, and new consumer demands in a stress-free way. Our framework is Time & Material: our clients pay only for the actual work done and have full visibility of the time invested in testing particular areas of their product.

So how does it work? We have hourly rates, and we track our work day-to-day. At the end of each month, we provide our clients with a report breaking down the tasks and person-hours spent. Our clients have access to our internal ticketing system for ultimate transparency and control of their finances.

We also offer 4 subscription plans - differing in the number of products under test, types of testing to be performed, the number of supported devices, operations systems, browsers, test documentation, among other things. All packages are presented in greater detail on the QAwerk pricing page.

Yes, we do. We've never shunned smaller projects because they equally need help with software testing and quality assurance. QAwerk's mission is to make software better by reducing the number of bugs it has, and it doesn't matter if you're a startup or an industry giant. Your product is never bug-free; what matters is how many critical bugs it has and how good you're at triaging those bugs. Our clients have high standards and they know their business is special.

I know that some well-established software agencies are quite picky and proceed only with big and lucrative projects. While they think they win, they actually lose. You can never predict how a product develops, especially on a discovery call. Have a look at Unfold: they came to us with the beta version of an Android app, and in about two years, they became prominent enough to launch a new offering and get acquired by Squarespace, a website builder & hosting provider known around the world.

Since the tech industry never stands still, our minimum budget requirements are also prone to change. When contacted directly, though, we have no trouble disclosing them and informing our prospects right away of whether we're the right fit for them or not.

Our clients are startups, midsize businesses, and large corporations from around the world. So far, we’ve worked with companies from North America, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and Africa. They all have varying testing needs, which explains the difference in project cost.

As of 2020, the price for projects we’ve delivered varied from $10000 to $2000 per month.

Lesson learned from 2020 is that you should never be too confident in what the future holds. Nevertheless, our QAwerk team dreams big and plans to continue accumulating expertise in new domains. Recently, we’ve formed a team of penetration testers, and in the coming years, we’re going to expand our horizontal market even further.

Another goal to reach is to extend our services to new geographies, such as Denmark, Sweden, and Japan.

Having the team of professionals motivated to grow together with QAwerk, I know what we’ve achieved so far is just the beginning.