When a bad release costs more than the testing does. In practice, that means one of three situations.
Yes, if:
No, if:
Four written artefacts, and you get all four. Nothing about the state of your product lives only in someone's head.
| Artefact | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Test plan | Goals, scope, what will and will not be tested, the types of tests, how often each iteration runs, and the tools and infrastructure it needs |
| Test cases | For each case: id, suite, preconditions, steps, expected result, actual result, priority, the defect it is linked to, whether it passed or failed, and whether it is automated |
| Defect reports | Description, the test case that found it, product version, steps to reproduce, priority based on business impact, status, and evidence as an image or a video |
| Summary report | Test cases created, run, passed and failed, in number and percentage, the failures by severity, and the defects found and still open in the release |
The browsers and devices we test against are agreed at kickoff: the ones your users actually have, with their OS versions and device models, along with the environment the tests run in.
Dedicated QA engineers, part of the team from the project kickoff, not a department the build gets handed to at the end.
| Test level | What it checks |
|---|---|
| Unit | Individual modules, classes and functions, on their own |
| Integration | How the different components behave when they talk to each other |
| System | The behaviour of the whole product, from your point of view as the client |
| User acceptance | The behaviour of the whole product, from the point of view of the person who will use it |
They combine black box testing of what the software does, white box testing of how the code does it, exploratory testing for the cases no script would think of, and regression testing of everything that was already fixed.
The tools follow the project. For example: Mocha and Chai for unit tests on Node.js, and Selenium WebDriver with TestNG and Maven for automated tests. Defects are tracked in a tool such as Jira, each one linked to the test case that found it.
On a dedicated team, QA is an optional role and one we recommend. It is not included by default, so you decide whether the team carries it. The project manager on our side is included at no extra cost and coordinates each release with your team.
QA is billed like any other role on the team: per sprint, for hours worked, in dollars, Net 14.
What it costs depends on seniority and on what the role covers, and you get the number in writing before you commit to anything. The minimum project size is $10,000, roughly one engineer for one month, and the shortest engagement we sign is two weeks, one sprint. There is no recruiting fee, no placement fee and no management fee, and the project manager on our side is included at no additional cost. Billing is per sprint, Net 14, or monthly if your finance team prefers, with volume discounts of 5 percent from five people and 10 percent from seven.
If you are about to migrate, or you have inherited an app nobody trusts, one QA engineer for one sprint is a real engagement and a cheap way to find out how bad it is.
A frontend migration inside a live customer service platform, an identity SDK that ships inside other companies' apps, and an MVP rescued after another team could not ship it.
Help Scout runs a customer service platform its clients work in all day. Our engineers, working inside the Help Scout team, migrated roughly five legacy sidebar applications from jQuery and Backbone to React. Feature parity and accessibility were explicit acceptance criteria rather than a follow-up, and the test coverage was built first, because it is what made an incremental rollout safe.
Acuant verifies identities for other companies. We built and maintained its iOS and JavaScript SDKs, including reading the NFC chip in a passport. That code runs inside other companies' production systems, so it ships through an automated release pipeline built for exactly that.
HeyConnect came to us after a third party MVP had failed. We reworked the database schema and the AWS infrastructure first, because everything above them depended on getting that right, and shipped the app in five months on the App Store and Google Play, at a 0.95 Apdex score. Anything above 0.94 is rated excellent.
Three different products get sold under the same word, "outsourcing". They are not interchangeable and picking the wrong one is the most expensive mistake in this category. QA is not a fourth model: it rides on one of these three.
| Staff augmentation | Dedicated team | Full-cycle product development | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who owns the roadmap | You | You | Shared, we run discovery |
| Who manages day to day | Your engineering manager | You, with a CodigoDelSur project manager coordinating on our side at no extra cost | Our project manager |
| What you get | Individual engineers inside your team | A team shaped around your product, staffed and coordinated by us | A product, from discovery to store release |
| You need to have | Technical leadership with spare capacity | A product owner and a clear roadmap | A budget and a problem worth solving |
| Where QA fits best | A QA engineer inside your team, testing what your own developers ship | A team that builds and tests its own releases, with QA as part of it | We own the product and its quality, from discovery to store release |
| Typical size | 1 to 4 people | 4 to 12 people | Scoped per project |
| Minimum commitment | Two weeks, one sprint | Two weeks, one sprint | Quoted per project |
| Best when | The work is defined and you are short on hands | You own a product area and want it staffed and coordinated as one team | You need the thing to exist and you do not have an engineering org |
When what you need is testing capacity with no code changes attached. If you need a lab full of physical devices, a certification audit or a one-off test pass on a product nobody will touch afterwards, a firm that only does testing is built for that. We are the right call when the risk is in the code, and the same team has to find the problem, fix it and prove the fix holds.
It is the same work seen from the other end. We review what the app does, put tests around the flows that matter, and fix from there. Cohorts, a community app that had launched with numerous bugs, got its defects fixed and an updated version published. SINES, a meditation app built by another team, is back to reliable operation and still maintained by us. If what you need is engineers inside your own team rather than a team of ours, that is staff augmentation.
Both. Test cases run by hand or with automation, depending on what the test plan calls for, and exploratory testing covers what a script would not think to try.
A summary report per iteration: test cases created, run, passed and failed by severity, and the defects still open in the release.
Our engineers work 10:00 to 19:00 Uruguay time, which is UTC minus 3. That covers the entire US East Coast working day, five to six hours of live overlap with the West Coast, and an afternoon overlap with Europe. The schedule is set that way deliberately: shifting the day an hour later widens the Pacific overlap without asking anyone to work nights, and it is the reason this arrangement is still working in month twelve rather than quietly falling apart in month three.
Five business days from signed agreement to first day is the standard, and if the engineer is already on our bench and your side is ready to receive them, they can start as soon as the next business day. What varies is finding the right person, not starting them: if the profile is on our bench you get CVs one business day after you sign off the role brief, and if the role has to be recruited, first CVs take about five business days. We tell you which of the two you are in on the first call, before you have signed anything, because that is what actually moves your start date.
You tell your account manager and we replace the person at our cost. There is no charge for the search and no penalty for asking. The outgoing and incoming engineers overlap for ten business days so that context, access and work in progress transfer inside the engagement instead of landing back on your team, and those ten days are not billed: during the handover you keep paying exactly what you were paying for one engineer. We would rather absorb that than have you carry a bad fit for a quarter, and a company that will not put a replacement policy in writing is telling you something.
You do, exclusively. Everything created for you as part of the work is assigned to you with full title guarantee: source code, application logic, APIs, integrations, data models, configurations, UI and UX designs, documentation and any derivative works. The assignment covers the deliverables as they are created, it is not conditional on final payment, and it is not a licence back to you, it is ownership. We also warrant that what we deliver does not infringe any third party's intellectual property, and where third party material is involved we secure the consents for both sides first. For our own pre existing components that were not written specifically for you, you get a non exclusive, irrevocable, royalty free licence to use, copy and modify them, so nothing we bring with us can be used to lock you in later. Every CodigoDelSur employee signs a non disclosure agreement and an intellectual property assignment as a condition of employment. In practice we also work inside your repositories and your cloud accounts, so in most engagements the code never lives anywhere else to begin with.
A full time engineer works for one client only. If you take someone full time they are on your product and nothing else: your standups, your sprint planning, your Slack, and for practical purposes they are part of your team, with the difference that their employment, payroll and career are our responsibility. If you only need part of a person we do offer part time engineers, and a part time engineer is assigned to a maximum of two projects, never more. We tell you which of the two you are getting before you sign, because "dedicated" is a word this industry uses loosely.
