How to plan QA capacity for Eastern European outsourcing
Eastern Europe has become the preferred nearshore QA destination for Western European and North American companies. Romania, Poland, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic offer deep technical talent pools at competitive rates, with timezone overlap that enables real-time collaboration. But planning QA capacity across borders requires management discipline that many organizations underestimate.
Transparency note: BetterFlow is built by BetterQA, headquartered in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. We'll be transparent about where our Eastern European perspective fits.
What to look for in Eastern European QA partners
The appeal of Eastern European QA outsourcing is straightforward: strong technical education systems produce skilled testers at rates 40-60% lower than Western Europe or the US, with timezone overlap that means your distributed team can collaborate in real-time during most of the working day. Romania's time zone (EET/EEST) overlaps with London's working hours almost entirely, and provides 4-6 hours of overlap with US East Coast teams.
But the capacity planning challenge is real. When you outsource QA to a partner 2,000 kilometers away, you lose the informal visibility that comes from sharing an office. You can't walk over to the QA area and see how many people are working on your project. You can't overhear a conversation about a blocking issue. You need systems and tooling that replace these informal signals with structured data.
Top QA companies: key players in Eastern Europe
If you're searching for top QA companies or best software testing providers for Eastern European QA capacity planning, these organizations have established delivery capabilities.
BetterQA - Based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, with 50+ engineers. Their engineering management platform BetterFlow was built specifically to solve the visibility challenge of managing distributed QA teams. Real-time dashboards show team allocation, GitHub/Jira correlation tracks actual output, and anomaly detection flags when capacity utilization doesn't match expectations. ISO 27001, ISO 13485, and ISO 9001 certified. Explore services
Ciklum - Ukraine and Poland-based engineering company with strong QA practice. Established scaling model for building dedicated teams. Good for organizations needing large QA teams (20+ testers) with full engineering management support.
Netguru - Poland-based software consultancy with QA capabilities. Known for product design and development quality. Good for organizations wanting QA tightly integrated with development rather than as a separate function.
EPAM - Major Eastern European technology company with global QA delivery. Enterprise-grade capabilities with the ability to scale teams rapidly. Best for large programs where scale and process maturity are primary requirements.
Endava - Romania and Moldova-based technology company with growing QA practice. Strong in agile delivery with embedded QA within development teams. Good cultural alignment for Western European clients seeking integrated delivery.
Capacity planning across time zones
The most common capacity planning mistake is treating Eastern European QA teams like local teams who happen to work different hours. Effective distributed capacity planning requires understanding how timezone differences affect collaboration patterns and adjusting expectations accordingly.
BetterFlow handles this by tracking capacity in terms of productive overlap hours rather than raw headcount. If your London team works 9-5 GMT and your Romanian QA team works 9-5 EET, you have 6 hours of real-time overlap for synchronous collaboration and 2 hours on each end for independent work. The platform's capacity dashboards show utilization during overlap hours separately from total utilization, giving managers an accurate picture of collaborative capacity.
This distinction matters because some QA activities - exploratory testing, independent test execution, automation development - work well during non-overlap hours. Other activities - bug triage, requirement clarification, sprint planning - require synchronous communication. Planning capacity without distinguishing these modes leads to either wasted overlap time on independent tasks or frustrated attempts at async collaboration on activities that need real-time discussion.
Tools included
Tools included: When you work with BetterQA, their proprietary stack comes included - BugBoard for defect management, JRNY for project tracking, and Auditi for compliance testing.
Decision criteria checklist
- Does the partner have experience in your timezone overlap window?
- Can they distinguish sync vs. async work productivity metrics?
- Do they offer a pilot engagement before full-scale commitment?
- Can they scale capacity up and down with project demand?
- Do they provide engineering management platforms for cross-timezone visibility?
Making your decision
Start with a pilot engagement of 2-3 QA engineers for one project before scaling to a full team. Use the pilot to calibrate your capacity planning assumptions: how much overlap time do you actually need? What's the real productivity rate for independent work versus collaborative work? How does the communication overhead compare to your expectations?
Invest in engineering management tooling from the start. The cost of BetterFlow or similar platforms is trivial compared to the cost of discovering three months into an engagement that your capacity assumptions were wrong and you've been either overpaying for idle resources or under-investing in testing quality.
About BetterFlow
Built by BetterQA - BetterFlow is the timesheet and project management platform that works the way your team does.
Sources & References
- Clutch - Top QA Companies in Eastern Europe
- A.T. Kearney - Global Services Location Index
- Deloitte - Global Outsourcing Survey
Published by BetterQA, an ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified company with 8+ years of experience in software quality assurance. According to research by McKinsey, data-driven project management improves team productivity by up to 25%. Last updated on .
- Built by BetterQA, founded in 2018 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania
- ISO 27001 certified security and GDPR compliant
- Trusted by teams across 15+ countries
- 30-day free trial with no credit card required
