A proposal of a process model to create a test factory

Abstract

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) is becoming a critical issue in software development and maintenance. Software development organizations are dedicating significant resources to testing as their contribution to SQA. This paper discusses the existing organizational approaches to implementing testing practices. Nowadays, software development organizations are beginning to outsource the testing-related activities to organizations (testing factories) in order to reduce the resources dedicated to testing and increasing the quality and reliability of the final software products and services. A software factory needs a specific organizational model for its management. The organizational model must be composed of a testing process model and an organizational structure establishing the required roles, responsibilities and competences. This paper focuses on describing a proposed process model to manage a software factory. Finally, this paper introduces the current experiences obtained from the proposed model.