Experience report: An industrial experience report on test outsourcing practices

Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Publication Date

1-2016

Abstract

Nowadays, many companies contract their testing functionalities out to third-party IT outsourcing companies. This process referred to as test outsourcing is common in the industry, yet it is rarely studied in the research community. In this paper, to bridge the gap, we performed an empirical study on test outsourcing with 10 interviewees and 140 survey respondents. We investigated various research questions such as the types, the process, and the challenges of test outsourcing, and the differences between test outsourcing and in-house testing. We found customer satisfaction, tight project schedule, and domain unfamiliarity are the top-3 challenges faced by the testers. We also found there are substantial differences between test outsourcing and in-house testing. For example, most of the test outsourcing projects focused on functional test, and rarely did unit test. Also, due to privacy policies of client companies, test outsourcing is performed mainly on the binary distributions of the projects, and rarely the testers can touch the source code. Our findings have implications for future research. For instance, as a starting point, researchers can create automated program comprehension tools which work on binary distributions of projects to help testers better design effective test cases.

Discipline

Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

26th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering: ISSRE 2015, Gaithersbury, United States, 2015 November 2-5

First Page

370

Last Page

380

ISBN

9781509004065

Identifier

10.1109/ISSRE.2015.7381830

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.

City or Country

Gaithersbury

Additional URL

http://doi.org./10.1109/ISSRE.2015.7381830

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