Ask HN: Any direct experience using QA services

Does anybody have inputs on google cloud test lab for mobile ?

Used to run QA for a startup and inherited an outsourced Applause Team for our consumer and B2B app.

They would find bugs, but often very cosmetic things - not too many bugs in our business logic (and not because of the absence of bugs within our app). It also took way too much time to manage/write the test cases out (~20 hours) since we were building out features so fast.

I looked into Rainforest QA after them. They're product seemed a better fit, but had a bad experience when one of sales guys used there used "retarded" to describe our current qa strategy.

Eventually I decided to dedicate our resources into building a frontend and backend automated testing framework. This was a way better decision, which we actually built out pretty fast.

If you can automate testing, especially on mobile, I highly recommend it. Building a testable app makes testing easier, whether you actually automate the testing or not.

Mobile testing kind of sucks, automated or not. Manual testing requires an ever increasing number of devices, and the actual testing is slow, monotonous work (aka good testers get bored and move on).

Maybe this approach... Automate what you can, making sure it behaves right. Use manual testing to verify it looks right, and as validation the automated tests didn't miss something.

As a tester myself, who's worked in multiple consultancy roles... It depends on vendor obviously but also on time and money. Do you have a budget and a timescale?

JourneymanCoder, I run a QA as a service company and we employ only certified QA people, in our office - no sourcing random talent from Upwork. We also have a lab of ~110 devices with different screen resolutions to test services on. That’s physical devices and real people testing on them. The pricing is straightforward - a fixed fee per platform per hour. Would you be interested in test-running our service for free (a few hours of testing + an hour of reporting) in exchange for honest feedback? If interested, feel free to reach out - contact info in my profile.