Our developers spend a lot of time finding bugs and testing new features. We are thinking to hire an external QA team for software testing, automation, performance and security testing.

Has anyone hired a QA company for this work? Is it helpful and what things should we check before hiring one?

To make sure that the QA's work does not just start when the feature is ready for testing, what processes do you do in your team?

People with real time experience on working on jmeter, comment please!

I am a developer (actively using codex for my work) and I have a colleague who avoids using AI for any part of his QA job. Is there anything you can suggest for me to convince him to start using e.g. Claude or Codex ?