On February 24, 2011, I presented “Role of Outsourcing: Finding Your Vision” to VANQ.org, the Vancouver Software Quality Assurance User Group and I wanted to share that material with you.
Consciously deciding your outsourcing approach is similar to choosing to use risk to drive your testing – Your resulting strategy will be customized to your specific needs and constraints.
Often the outsourcing solution is not decided by the team but rather mandated or inherited (including the choice not to have one), much like the expensive software tools that sit on the proverbial shelf – Purchased without a proper needs vs. solutions analysis, or a plan of how to implement and roll-out to gain the full breadth of promised benefits.
In the recent whitepaper “Survey Report – Project Success & Test Outsourcing”, it seemed that responses generally supported the feeling that the software industry has advanced in the last 10 years with respect to its attitude towards project success, customer satisfaction and quality, and including outsourcing of testing as part of the solution to that success. But it was still clear that some organizations have the opportunity to see significant improvement benefits by reviewing how they are structured internally and how they conduct their quality and test efforts whether there is the intention to outsource or not.
In the following presentation, the software testing function of an organization is used to discuss crafting a multi-faceted sourcing solution model aimed at providing benefits on a combination of fronts including cost efficiency, capacity scalability, optimized communication, domain expertise capture/retention, specialized skills access, centralized strategic planning and accountability, etc.
Perhaps there is such an opportunity to identify and organize the teams, their activities and processes within your organization to realize such benefits as well, enabling a greater capability for overall project success.
