Title
Outsourcing Software Testing: A Case Study in the Oulu Area
Abstract
Global software engineering increases coordination, communication, and control challenges in software development. The testing phase in this context is not a widely researched subject. In this paper, we study the outsourcing of software testing in the Oulu area, research the ways in which it is used, and determine the observable benefits and obstacles. The companies that participated in this study were found to use the outsourcing possibility of software testing with good efficiency and their testing process was considered to be mature. The most common benefits, in addition to the companies' cost savings, included the utilization of time zone differences for around-the-clock productivity, a closer proximity to the market, an improved record of communication and the tools that record the audit materials. The most commonly realized difficulties consisted of teamwork challenges, a disparate tool infrastructure, tool expense, and often-elevated coordination costs. We utilized in our study two matrices that consist in one dimension of the three distances, control, coordination, and communication, and in another dimension of four distances, temporal, geographical, socio-cultural and technical. The technical distance was our extension to the matrix that has been used as the basis for many other studies about global software development and outsourcing efforts. Our observations justify the extension of matrices with respect to the technical distance.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/QSIC.2013.53
Quality Software
Keywords
Field
DocType
outsourcing effort,technical distance,software development,software testing,case study,global software development,often-elevated coordination cost,outsourcing possibility,testing phase,outsourcing software testing,oulu area,global software engineering increase,testing process,geographical distance,control,outsourcing,communication,observations,coding,interviews
System integration testing,Personal software process,Systems engineering,Computer science,Outsourcing,Software metric,Software quality,Software construction,Software development,Social software engineering
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1550-6002
2
0.39
References 
Authors
15
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ilkka Tervonen1478.13
Antti Haapalahti220.39
Lasse Harjumaa3516.24
Jouni Similä4447.85