“Hand off QA, get 80%+ coverage in weeks, ship faster.”
That pitch sounds great. Where do we sign up?
You sign up on any QA agency website. This is the standard promise for QA agencies who want to take over your testing: comprehensive testing without the headcount, so your engineers can focus on building while someone else handles the boring stuff.
But what you are really outsourcing here is quality. You are giving an agency, which by definition will treat your product as part of a portfolio, the keys to your success. When quality is someone else's problem, it stops being anyone's responsibility. Your engineers ship code over the wall. The agency finds bugs when they get to it. Nobody owns the outcome.
In practice, outsourcing the capability of quality, not just test execution, slows product feedback, erodes product knowledge, and increases the surface area for failure.
Outsourcing kills velocity
Longer feedback loops tank velocity. This is obvious. But QA agencies will sell you on the idea that their "dedicated team" and "24-hour coverage" actually accelerate feedback. They'll show you Gantt charts where testing happens "in parallel" with development.
Here's what actually happens:
- Your engineer finishes a feature at 3 PM.
- It goes into the QA queue.
- The agency's team, juggling six different clients, picks it up the next morning.
- They find an issue at noon.
- They write a bug report by 2 PM.
- Your engineer, now deep into the next feature, sees the report at 4 PM.
- They can't reproduce it because the test environment has different data.
- Three Slack threads and two days later, they discover it was a configuration issue.
That's a 72-hour feedback loop for a bug that internal QA would have caught in 30 minutes.
The problem compounds because it's not a simple cycle. High-performing teams win on short, tight feedback loops: fast CI, fast reviews, loosely coupled code, and rapid detection of regressions. This creates a rhythm. Code flows from conception to production, with each stage providing immediate signals about quality.
Outsourcing breaks this rhythm. Every handoff to the external team creates a queue. Every queue creates wait time. Every wait creates context switching. Your engineers learn to batch work because individual pieces take too long to validate. They ship larger changes less frequently. The feedback gets noisier. Debugging gets harder. Outsourcing the discovery and triage step inserts an external queue and cross-org coordination into your loop, precisely the opposite of fast feedback.
Outsourcing destroys knowledge
There's a more insidious problem. Long-term velocity stagnates as product knowledge walks out the door.
When your QA team sits in standups, they absorb context. They know why you built that weird workaround. They remember the edge case that broke production last year. They understand the tradeoffs you made. This knowledge compounds over time, making them faster at spotting issues, better at assessing risk, and more effective at preventing problems.
External QA teams never build this knowledge. They follow test scripts. They check requirements documents. But they don't know why your checkout flow works that way, why that validation exists, or why that particular edge case matters. Every test cycle, they start from zero context. Six months in, they're no more effective than day one.
Your internal team's knowledge erodes too. Engineers stop thinking about edge cases because "QA will catch it." They lose touch with how the system behaves end-to-end because they only see their slice. Product managers stop understanding failure modes because bug reports come filtered through an external team's interpretation.
The velocity trap isn't just about speed. It's about losing the institutional knowledge that makes speed possible. You haven't just outsourced testing. You've outsourced understanding.
Outsourcing isn’t economic
The landing page math looks simple. QA engineer: $130,000/year. QA service: $5,000/month. You save $70,000 annually. Case closed.
Let's model what actually happens with a realistic 10-person engineering team building a SaaS product.
Month 1: The Honeymoon
The agency onboards quickly. They promise 80% coverage in 4 weeks. Your engineers hand over staging access, a few Loom videos, and get back to building. The agency starts cranking out tests. Your dashboard shows beautiful green charts climbing toward that 80% target. Everything looks great.
Month 3: The Hidden Costs Emerge
Your sprint planning now includes a new ritual: the QA sync. That's 10 engineers × 1 hour/week = 10 engineering hours/week coordinating with external QA.
Bug reports start piling up, but they're often unclear. "Button doesn't work sometimes" requires three back-and-forth messages to understand it only fails for users with German locale settings. Each bug now averages 45 minutes of clarification. With 20 bugs/week, that's 15 hours of engineering time just understanding what QA found.
Your engineers start batching work because individual features take too long to validate. Instead of deploying daily, you deploy weekly. Your cycle time stretches from 1 day to 5 days. Customer feedback that used to get fixed in hours now takes a week.
Month 6: The True Bill Arrives
Let's add up the real costs:
- QA service: $5,000/month = $60,000/year
- Coordination meetings: 10 engineers × 52 hours/year × $100/hour = $52,000
- Bug clarification: 15 hours/week × 52 weeks × $100/hour = $78,000
- Context switching: 10 engineers losing 10% productivity = 1 FTE = $130,000
- Delayed releases: Harder to quantify, but if you're shipping 5x slower, that's massive opportunity cost
Total real cost: $320,000/year
You're paying 2.5x more than hiring internal QA, or using automated testing, and that's before counting the opportunity costs.
Small teams feel it worse. For a 3-person startup, the impact is existential. You don't have 10% productivity to lose. Every hour spent in QA coordination is an hour not talking to customers. Every day waiting for test results is a day competitors pull ahead.
Insource all quality
The solution isn't "never use external help." But don’t outsource the capability of quality. Instead:
- Outsource execution, not ownership. Use external teams for manual regression testing during launches. Use them for exploratory testing on new platforms. But your team writes the test strategy, owns the critical tests, and maintains the feedback loop.
- Outsource specialty, not core. Need accessibility testing? Performance testing? Security testing? These require specialized expertise worth external help. But your core functionality tests stay internal.
- Augment, don't replace. Tools that enhance your team's testing capability preserve velocity. They help your engineers write better tests faster. Ownership and knowledge remain with your team.
Teams that keep quality ownership internal while selectively augmenting with tools maintain their velocity. Those that hand over the keys find themselves locked out of their own product, paying more for less, and wondering why shipping software got so hard.
