You can visit opensourcetesting.org you will find "helpful" resources there

You can also look at the new generation of Test Management Systems, developed with the idea of providing a flexible and robust solution for organizations that don't want to spend a lot of time installing, hosting and configuring a Complex Application such as Quality Center.

There a number of such systems available, I can recommend the one we developed called PractiTest (http://www.practitest.com) It is a hosted system that provides coverage for Requirements, Tests, Defects, Reports, etc. Fully customizable and very intuitive. We offer a 30-Day Free evaluation period so you can check it Risk Free.

Good Luck,

-joel

I've worked in the past with multiple companies who do outsourcing and offshoring services. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. But it is basically due to a limited number of factors:

1. Is you organization structured enough to outsourced it's tests? Is the process in place to allow you to work this way?

2. Do you have a partner that is serious enough, and capable enough to do the job right? Many companies say they can do it, but many of these are also unable to do it right, so check this company and look for references to their work.

3. Can you manage the process? To dream that you can just send them the product and they will mail you back the bugs is only that, a dream. Once you wake up you will understand that it became a nightmare. So you need to manage this team and the process correctly. For this you need a good process, a good partner, and the correct set of tools.

4. Last but not least, you need to know what you want to achieve. Many companies do this since they want to cut prices, but this is also a dream that many times is sold short. Yes, it is most probably cheaper, but not by the margins you expect. You will also need to invest more time in communication, management, flights, etc. So know what you want to achieve and then review if it is achievable once you add all the costs and process changes required.

OK, this is only my short view on the subject and what I learned in my past.

Good luck!

-joel

Let's separate (a) issue tracking and (b) test management tools. For the first, the two market leaders for the small- medium size ISV are FogBugz and Jira. Look also at OnTime and Polarion.

For (b) the first thing to say is don't get your hopes up. With any kind of GUI none of the automation tools go far enough (at least as far as I would expect). Their ability to preserve tests in the face of changes to the GUI or timing issues is very limited. So you end up dedicating considerable resources to the maintenance of automated tests. By considerable I mean 10-20% of your overall dev resources, maybe even higher. The good news is that the resulting test suite is part of your valuable intellectual property and does indeed foster a much higher quality, which is something that is difficult to achieve without such a suite, particularly as a company grows.

Be careful that if you have separate solutions for (a) and (b) you will need to manage the overlap. E.g. some test management tools also act as repositories for specifications of enhancements, at which point they completely overlap with application lifecycle management (ALM) tools.

In terms of managing the tests, we've looked at software to do this, including some open source, but decided that a wiki is good enough for the bulk of the issues.

If you are supporting multiple releases (versions), modern distributed version control systems offer an advantage: in the same way as a DVCS encourages you to fix a bug in the earliest supported occurrence, you can also create a test. We are beginning to explore the implications of this.

Constantine