THE TRUE COST OF  OUTSOURCING END-TO-END TESTING

Step 1
Determine how many tests you need
Developers on your team
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+
Team size is a good indicator of your app’s testing footprint.
App age
0 yrs
The age of an application affects the number of tests it needs due to factors such as codebase stability, accumulated complexity, and tech debt.
Coverage
Badge
0%
Aiming for 80% E2E test coverage ensures critical paths are well-tested, significantly reducing the risk of undetected bugs.
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Step 2
Test creation & management
Time to create each test
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2 hours per test case on average. This includes outlining, coding, creating test data, and verifying it works.
Time to investigate and fix a failed test
0 hrs / test
~1.5 hours on average. This includes re-running the test, reproducing the failure, debugging, PR reviews, and re-deploying the test code.
edit fail rate
Fail rate
0%
High velocity teams with daily releases see about 7.5% of tests fail.
Outsource billing rate
$0 / hr
$65/hr is a global average from QA firms in the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Keep in mind that this doesn’t include the “management tax” your team will pay for hands-on management and coaching.
Number of SDETs
By default, we recommend the number of Software Development Engineers in Test (SDETs) based on industry standards.
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+
SDET Salary
Include at least 1 SDET to set salary.
$0 / year
As of January 2022, the base salary for titles like Senior Software Engineer in Test and SDET in the US was $120,000 before benefits and other comp.
Step 3
Runs setup
Run Cadence
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You should run the suite at least daily, or more if you deploy continuously.
Run type
Tests run one after another on a single resource. This method is simpler and may have lower initial costs, but can be time-consuming, especially for large test suites.
Market rate per sequential run
$0
The average cost per sequential test run across AWS (t3.micro, t3.small, t3.medium, m5.large), CircleCI, GitHub Actions, and Travis CI is approximately $0.03 per run.
Average test length
0min
3-5 minutes is a good benchmark
Tests run simultaneously across multiple resources. This method can reduce total execution time significantly but might incur higher costs due to the need for more resources.
Cost for parallelization of an individual test
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$
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Major vendors charge ~$130/test/mo for up to 25 parallel runs and ~$100/test/mo for 26 or more.
Number of tests ran in parallel per run
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Max:
0
Example: If you have 200 tests, you might run 4 batches of 50.
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What it takes to outsource QA
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Tests for 80% coverage
information: hover/press here for details
0
Time to create
100
tests
0
Business days
Cost to create
100
tests
$0
Test runs
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0
/ mo
(
[#tests]
tests
running
2x
[per day]
)
100 test failures
100 test runs
Test failures
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0
/ mo
Test maintenance
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0
hrs / mo
Recommended staffing
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0 Contractors
,
0 SDETs
test
Staffing Cost
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$
0
/ year
1 Contractor(s)
1 SDET(s)
With a team of 5 developers, we estimate you’d need 125 tests to reach 80% coverage. To run those tests 1x per day, while factoring in the cost of infra, it would cost you a grand total of $195,000/yr.
Running your tests [$type]
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10 tests in parallel (45 batches)
Time spent
0
hrs / year
Run cost
$
0
/ year
Total cost of outsourcing E2E testing