Currently, there are 5 basic types of outsourcing testing according to the identified problems in the software production:

1. Complete outsourcing of the entire testing and software quality assurance.
2. The performance of the complicated, non-core, resource-intensive testing.
3. Faster extension of the company resources by the dedicated testing team.
4. Support of existing program products by testing of new releases.
5. The performance of the independent quality audit.

The last issue contains several additional categories, depending on who is the customer of independent software testing.

If the customer is the software developer, he or she wants to make certain of the produced product quality and correctness in organization of its production cycle. If the customer is the software user who wants to perform an acceptance testing competently, in this case, the software developer gets more confidence in the quality of the purchased product.

System integrators can also be the customers of the independent testing services. They are interested in the software interfacing, equipment of various vendors and the features of reliability and performance of the software-hardware complex.

Despite the fact that all types of the software testing outsourcing have common features, there are some differences in the way of their organization, docflow and even in the quality of the final results. So, it makes the sense to consider each type more profoundly.