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.