Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

11-2015

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

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

2015 26th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE): November 2-5, Gaithersbury, MD, Proceedings)

First Page

370

Last Page

380

ISBN

9781509004058

Identifier

10.1109/ISSRE.2015.7381830

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

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

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