Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
enterprise systems, testing services for products being developed, testing services
for systems already in production, and so on.
Software testing offshoring provides outstanding benefits like significantly lower
costs, improved quality, and speedier go-to-market benefits for software products.
Processes for successful offshoring have already been refined, as many software
service providers have been in this business for a long time and have gone through
the steep learning curve. Their standardized and benchmarked processes ensure
consistency across projects, meaningfully utilize the body of knowledge gathered
from all previous projects, efficiently utilize labor, and thus provide very high qual-
ity service at lower costs and at reduced schedules.
11.1
Challenges
So you want to take advantage of offshoring for your software testing projects.
How can you do that? What issues might you have to consider? Is the service
provider you are choosing up to it? Are you sure that the relationship is going
to work?
There will be a number of questions in your mind, as well as that of your cus-
tomer, which need to be addressed. How can these issues be resolved?
These challenges can be tackled by having a good checklist and getting correct
answers for these questions and then doing your evaluation on these answers. You
can provide these checklists along with your answers to your customer so that he is
also confident of the outsourcing deal with you.
So here is the checklist that you can use to evaluate your options when you are
going to get your customer's project offshored.
11.1.1
Customer Concerns
11.1.1.1
Commercial Concerns
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Concern 1: What is the strategy for your customer to offshore his projects?
Will he be outsourcing his entire test organization, just a single project, or
just a single task on a single project?
Mitigation strategy:
−
Whatever the scenario, be prepared to show your
commitment to the relationship by showing how you can help your cus-
tomer by doing this task on his behalf. Most customers do not outsource
everything. They keep some development and testing work with them-
selves. In all cases customers keep the controlling aspect of the outsourced
projects themselves.
Concern 2: Does your customer want to outsource to reduce headcount or to
◾
augment his expertise?
