Belitsoft has over 20-year history and a proven track record of building dedicated development teams in Eastern Europe.
Surveys unveil a suppressing number of IT decision-makers favoring outsourcing to nearshore locations as a cost-cutting strategy. In 2025, many businesses – especially startups and enterprises in the US, UK, and Canada – are transferring their automation testing projects to nearshore tech hubs. Eastern Europe has become the preferred nearshoring hub for UK businesses, while traditional offshore locations like India are steadily losing ground in this market. For example, UK-based customers are discovering that highly qualified developers located just a short flight away can produce better outcomes with fewer hassles.
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Factors Influencing the Nearshoring Trend
Economic Climate and Cost Pressure
Constant recession and inflation fears have made budget control the top consideration for tech executives in 2025. Nearshoring enables a quick financial relief. By staffing in-company units with workforce in lower-cost neighboring locations, UK corporations typically reduce labor costs by 30–50%. Such savings are significant as tech budgets tighten.
Local Talent Gaps
By 2025, UK firms are experiencing a local tech talent shortage, so they are extending their QA teams with automation testers from nearshore hubs. Eastern Europe provides a deep bench to tap into. Access to expertise is nearly as significant as cost: according to various surveys, companies list the ability to obtain specialized skills as a prime driver for nearshoring. With Eastern Europe’s QA centers, UK companies can cope with hiring bottlenecks and speed up the delivery of innovative digital products.
Quality, Oversight, and Strategic Business Value
Eastern Europe is well-known for high-caliber tech education and software engineering excellence; in fact, a number of its nations place in the top 10 worldwide for developer proficiency in coding contests and rankings. Clients report that code quality and productivity from Eastern European teams align with Western standards or exceed them, cancelling the common opinion that outsourcing refers only to cheap labor.
Moreover, nearshore collaboration models tend to be partnership-oriented and flexible. Nearshore providers are increasingly viewed by UK CIOs as an explicit extension of their own capabilities rather than merely contractors. As a result, duties like intellectual property and innovation can be distributed more easily.
In sensitive sectors like healthcare and finance, a closer location offers better supervision – it’s easier to organize on-site audits or ensure compliance when your development hub is within Europe rather than on another continent.
When choosing a nearby country over a farshore one, businesses consider access to skills, faster time to market, and better control, in addition to cost savings.
Geopolitical and Security Drivers
Companies rebuild their outsourcing strategy. Many are implementing an “India-plus” model, supporting Asia-based QA centers with nearshore teams to ensure resilience. Some businesses started considering Eastern Europe as a backup location to guarantee business continuity in 2025 as the conflict in South Asia escalated.
In the UK context, companies increasingly favor EU-compliant countries to meet regulatory rules and ensure data sovereignty. EU member states in Eastern Europe provide strong intellectual property laws and well-known legal frameworks (GDPR data protection), which ease concerns about outsourcing sensitive development work.
Time Zone and Communication Advantages
Unlike distant places like Latin America, India, or East Asia, which are several time zones away, Eastern Europe is practically next door to the UK. Poland and other important tech hubs are only one to three hours ahead of UK time, enabling full workday overlap and real-time collaboration.
The teams can communicate in real time, schedule meetings during regular business hours, and resolve issues in a few hours rather than waiting all day because they are in almost the same time zone.
Since most Eastern European IT workers speak English fluently and adhere to Western business practices, integrating nearshore developers into UK teams is smooth.
Nearshore teams run similarly to internal employees. They don’t face the communication and cultural misunderstandings that offshore teams frequently encounter. That is why they stay coordinated and move faster on complex, rapid software projects.
Capabilities and Expertise Test Automation Divisions Must Have in 2025
Today, clients seek QA partners who can assign seasoned specialists quickly, work with modern tooling, and serve as true problem solvers for in-house teams that lack the time and resources to cope with issues on their own. Clients prioritise vendors not by framework lists but by their ability to align with clients’ changing environment mid-project.
Full-Stack Platform Maintenance: Mobile, Web, IoT, API, and Beyond
Nowadays, companies expect QA providers to support mobile (Espresso, Appium, XCUITest), web (Cypress, Selenium, Playwright), APIs (REST, Assured, Postman), and whatever else the product demands – including IoT firmware and desktop builds. Businesses look for proof that the partner has device farms or partnerships with Sauce Labs, BrowserStack, or in-house cloud labs.
One high-signal capability for connected platforms is the ability to script coordinated end-to-end flows across devices. For example, retail applications that span phones, watches, and point-of-sale systems. Device/browser coverage matrices and traceable outcomes for each interface the user interacts with are among the deliverables.
In 2025, organizations are expecting nearshore hubs to integrate AI into the workflow. That involves dynamic prioritization, AI-based test generation, and bug clustering. Also, self-healing scenarios that don’t crack every time a UI element moves are highly valued.
Clients ask QA partners directly: Can your tooling improve test selection based on the insights about past failures? Can you cut the inspection time for a failure run from days to hours and from hours to minutes?
If a vendor answers “yes, but only manually”, its team drops out. At the same time, businesses don’t think that AI is a magic tool – they want it to be partnered with human supervision.
AI-driven test maps and a human-reviewed defect analysis that distinguishes between genuine regressions and flimsy failures are frequently included in deliverables.
Low-Code Testing
Teams can create automated flows without scripting by using low-code or no-code tools like Leapwork, TestProject, and Katalon. In order to extend these tools, clients attempt to set them up, configure test suites, and train internal users. Codeless testing is particularly popular with non-technical stakeholders.
Always-On QA
Currently, testing begins at commit and continues in production. Instead of being a distinct sign-off step, QA teams are supposed to be a part of the development process. That means:
- Every production release is subjected to unit and integration tests.
- Observing actual user behavior in a production setting
- Testing for feature flags
- Testing observability tools (such as Cypress dashboards or Datadog synthetic checks).
Service providers must deliver across that entire spectrum if they want to be referred to as QA partners. In addition to being able to write automation, clients are looking for testers who understand Git, CI tools (such as CircleCI and GitHub Actions), monitoring, and post-release rollback techniques. Pre-launch validation is no longer the only aspect of QA.
DevOps and CI/CD Integration
It is expected of QA vendors to integrate tests directly into continuous integration (CI) by plugging into GitLab, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or Azure DevOps, depending on what the client is leveraging. This covers shift-left coverage on APIs and units, parallel execution, and containerization.
Organizations running multi-cloud or multi-region delivery look for full test management across environments. Contractors often deliver Dockerized test runners, YAML pipelines, and test dashboards that tie to overseeing tools like DataDog or Grafana.
Always Growing, Framework-Ready, and Tool-Agnostic
In 2025, clients expect a vendor that is evolving instead of working with one familiar stack. They want developers who can convert the solution from Selenium to Playwright. Engineers who have worked with Cucumber in BDD-heavy organizations. QA professionals who have created test runners in-house when the tools didn’t meet their quality requirements.
Also, QA partners are desired to adjust to the client’s tooling. But the outsourced teams are also expected to bring best practices and improvements. If the client’s setup is outdated or unstable, they want to hear that. Moreover, they expect a thorough plan on how to address that. Partners who can adopt chaos testing, real user monitoring into a QA scenario, or service virtualization, stand out.
Test Data Management
In 2025, clients seek partners who can reset test environments on each run, handle synthetic data, and obfuscate production sets. That demands skills with data factories, containerized DBs, virtualization, or tailored mocking layers.
In finance and healthcare industries, QA vendors must validate that no personally identifiable information is used in tests and that environments can be manually restored to a clean state. Customers inquire about how test data is cleared, seeded, isolated, and refreshed. As part of their engagement, seasoned vendors provide test data strategies that include rollback automation, masking procedures, and templates.
Domain Expertise
In 2025, a simple understanding of how the UI looks is not enough. Businesses want QA teams who deeply understand how their systems run. Clients are likely to shortlist vendors who:
- have worked in banking and realize the difference between wire and ACH;
- have verified CRM logic in Salesforce or field service management in SAP;
- know HIPAA compliance points and have tested EHR flows.
Test coverage that reflects real business risk demonstrates domain fluency. Deliverables include requirement coverage matrices, defect trends associated with particular verticals, and risk-based test maps. Additionally, it cuts down on ramp time because “order to cash” doesn’t need to be explained.
Embedded Delivery and Soft Skills
Beyond all the automation talk, soft skills are still what make or break the collaboration. Clients value testers to integrate into sprints, take part in standups, prioritize issues in Jira, and respond in Slack when something goes wrong.
Test results must be delivered on schedule and in a way that non-QA stakeholders can understand. This usually entails two levels:
- dev-facing logs with tracebacks and repro steps
- executive dashboards with test trends and pass rates.
QA partners are also estimated by their ability to coordinate across time zones, support speed despite handoffs, and dedicate PMs who can own delivery without ongoing customer input. Clear escalation routes and real-time dashboards are among the deliverables.
Elastic Delivery and Global Coverage
Clients don’t want to hire 10 testers for 3 weeks. They prefer a team that can scale up when the workload rises and roll off when the load is stable.
Outsourcing partners who can scale workforce, share skill sets, or assign domain professionals on-demand tend to win more contracts. To ensure multi-time-zone coverage and regional compliance, they provide access to global test talent reserves.
Delivery flexibility is the key here, whether it be through embedded pods, long-term staff augmentation, short-term burst projects, or even specialized offshore test labs. Customers want to see that the vendor can adapt to their company’s changing needs and not handle every project in the same way.
Test Automation Service Types
Functional, API, performance, and security are the same categories of test automation services across industries in 2025, but there are differences in how they are scoped, carried out, and provided.
Functional UI Testing
Customers anticipate test coverage that reflects actual behavior.
It is expected of vendors to provide maintainable suites that cover these flows across devices and browsers, are integrated into continuous integration, and have early warning capabilities.
Test scripts, pipeline configurations, and coverage reports that indicate which flows are validated where are among the deliverables.
Mobile OS maintenance and cross-browser matrices are frequently included in contracts for enterprise clients. The typical request: “Can users complete their task, on every device, every time?”
API and Integration Testing
In open banking, this means validating that every endpoint reacts properly, securely, and in accordance to regulatory policies. In the telecom industry, it involves confirming that APIs cause the appropriate downstream behavior across BSS/OSS systems.
Contractors provide:
- sets of CI-integrated executions
- readable reports with request/response logs
- API tests (in Postman, RestAssured, or custom frameworks).
Performance and Load Testing
Customers look for vendors to provide insights and replicate real-world volume. This means detecting bottlenecks, setting explicit thresholds, and conducting load tests on actual infrastructure (or staging mirrors).
Performance tuning recommendations are frequently provided by vendors as part of the package.
Weekly or per-release automated performance checks with baseline deviation alerts are conducted in high-transaction environments (finance, telecom). Performance dashboards, test scripts for programs like JMeter or K6, and post-test tuning guidance are among the deliverables offered here.
Security Testing
Customers value QA partners who perform dynamic scans, integrate static analysis, and incorporate simple penetration test simulations into the suite.
A security test report is a necessary artifact prior to any release in verticals that are subject to strict regulations. Deliverables include vulnerability scan logs, OWASP Top 10 coverage maps, and the outcomes of release-blocking tests in the event that serious problems are discovered.
In order to prevent deployment until all security checks are completed, some vendors install pre-release security gates that operate in staging.
DAST tooling is used for input validation, rate limits, and test authentication in environments with a lot of APIs.
Regression & Continuous Testing
Regression suites are developed by QA vendors and executed with each build, release, or nightly, depending on the cadence that corresponds with the release cycle.
The aim is to ensure that the new code didn’t break the old one.
Trend graphs and test run deltas are frequently used in SaaS and retail.
To Wrap Up
To maintain growth, Eastern European countries are consistently investing in their IT initiatives. With consistent market growth, the region is expected to keep its position as a leading outsourcing hotspot after 2025. More UK businesses might open their own captive development facilities in locations like Warsaw, in addition to working with outside vendors.
One of the key trends of 2025 for UK companies looking to strike a balance between talent, cost, and risk is the shift from offshore to nearshore development teams. Eastern Europe’s emergence as Europe’s “nearshore Silicon Valley” is evidence of the region’s potential and strong fit with Western corporate demands.
It allows UK businesses to confidently and competitively build the future close to home by “rightshoring” their operations.
Author: Dmitry Baraishuk is a partner and Chief Innovation Officer at a software development company Belitsoft (a Noventiq company). He has been leading a department specializing in custom software development for 20 years. The department has hundreds of successful projects in AI software development, healthcare and finance IT consulting, application modernization, cloud migration, data analytics implementation, and more for startups and enterprises in the US, UK, and Canada.
