Abstracta Helps Clients Release Quality Digital Products At Speed With Outsourced Software Testing

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Below is our recent interview with Federico Toledo, Chief Operations Officer at Abstracta:

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Abstracta?

A: Back in 2008, I started Abstracta with my colleagues and former classmates, Fabian Baptista and Matias Reina, as we were developing a test automation tool for a software development platform, GeneXus. We were just three twenty-something guys coding in our garage in Montevideo, Uruguay without the intention of starting a testing company, but from then on, we saw a need in our city for more testing services, and we wanted to try our hand at entrepreneurship.

We assembled a team and rented our first office, then six years ago, we had moved into a larger one and started to set our sights on the US and one of our performance engineers at the time, Sofía Palamarchuk, took the lead of that initiative and has since joined our Board of Directors. Today, we now have about 110 employees with three offices in Uruguay and one in California, Chile, and the UK.

Today, we provide outsourced software testing services primarily to companies in the US and Europe in the e-commerce, finance, healthcare, and high tech industries such as Shutterfly, Broadcom, Heartflow, Santander, and more. Besides paying the utmost attention to our clients and their needs, we also place a very heavy focus on our local and global testing community, organizing, supporting, attending and speaking at events around the world.

We’re also involved in programs that help different demographics of people break into testing, to find those better job opportunities that we know are available in technology and to help combat the global STEM talent shortage. Our philosophy is that, instead of poaching senior talent from other companies, we prefer to increase the size of the pie so to speak, for everyone’s benefit, by forming more, highly skilled testers and developers that come to work for us.

Q: Can you give us insights into your solutions?

A: Our testers, developers, and leaders help fast growing companies to fill their software testing gaps without slowing down their development cycles or inflating costs. With the increased demands of the market today, having the ability to iterate quickly and produce quality digital products is critical to compete. Our key testing service areas are:

Mobile Testing – We’ll run the best mix of tests on different platforms and devices to enable more 5-star ratings for your app.
Performance Engineering – With load testing and application performance monitoring, we help clients to avoid system slowness, excessive resource usage and downtime which can cost companies tens of thousands of dollars per year.
Functional Testing – We can perform scripted and/or exploratory testing to uncover risks, detecting any errors, or find where your system is not meeting requirements.
Test Automation – By automating specific checks, we can free up your team to focus on other aspects of the software while increasing test coverage and the ROI of testing.
Custom Tool Development – When the testing tools on the market are just not right for our clients’ needs, we can adapt an open source stack or build a custom tool from scratch.

Q: What should be considered when choosing the right outsourced software testing company?

A: Frankly, there are hundreds of companies that provide software testing services, some 10,000 employees strong and some only two. To pick one of them, you have to know your criteria and then evaluate the potential fit. When it comes to your criteria, it’s important to first assess 1) what kind of engagement you’re looking for and 2) what you need in a testing company.

For example, you may be looking to hire a tester or team of testers for a short, one-off project or augment your team or completely outsource testing. Also, what kind of role do you want the testing company to take on? Do you want them to consult you and advise you on your test strategy or are you just looking for more “players” to join the team to carry out your own game plan? Therefore, first make sure to have a good idea about the duration of the relationship, the engagement model, and what specific services you’d like (such as test execution, training, consulting, etc.)

Then, when you are evaluating different companies, you should consider the ideal size, location, hourly rates, cultural compatibility, and communication style of the company. These factors will all greatly affect your relationship and satisfaction.

Finally, to help decide between your top contenders, make sure to see which one has the most clients that are similar to you, experience in your domain, awards, positive client reviews on third party sites like Clutch.co, and evidence of thought leadership, like conference speakers, helpful blog articles, etc. At Abstracta, we try very hard to evangelize cutting-edge practices in testing that we use with our clients and share them with the world as best as we can! We also know the power of reviews, so we keep our Clutch profile very active, asking our clients to leave their feedback there.

Q: How is your approach unique? What makes you stand out?

A: Unlike the larger outsourcing and consulting companies with a wide breadth of IT offerings, we are purely focused on software testing, helping companies to facilitate agile development and harnessing the power of open source tools. And, unlike outsourcing firms in countries like India, the fact that our offices are in the Americas and Europe enables us to enjoy real-time communication with our clients.

But, what really makes us different than other testing companies is that R&D is part of our DNA and that’s what helps us to evolve. As our company sprang from our initial invention of a test automation tool, we are still to this day innovating and creating our own testing tools.

When we meet a client who needs to create a custom tool, we are excited to step up to the challenge. We’ve created some tools internally that we’re currently bringing to market, like Oculow and keep your eyes peeled for a reincarnation of our mobile testing tool, Monkop. Lastly, we also team up with tool vendors, like BlazeMeter, to bring more testing solutions to the market.

Q: What are your plans for the future?

A: We are very excited to keep growing, as the size of our company has grown by 40% since January and we don’t plan to slow down. This year, we opened an office in the UK and another in Chile, our first franchise, and we’re already putting our feelers out for more opportunities to franchise in other parts of the world like the United States, Bolivia, and we’ve even seen interest from Japan. On a personal note, I look forward to growing my network and attending more events in the states as I recently moved to Berkeley, California with my wife where we could be in the center of all of the innovation that is going on in Silicon Valley and closer to our clients.

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