Offshoring and Quality assurance
For every software product company which is doing agile offshore, Quality Assurance (QA) is one of the critical components that help in maintaining a competitive edge. While doing QA with geographically dispersed teams, the offshore team has to offer end-to-end customer-oriented testing service till the software as designed and implemented fulfills the requirements set out at the requirements stage.
Well and good…So the question is How can we assure the win- win situation for both onsite and offsite sides?
When the customer and the team are separated by a distance, certain issues invariably arise. And QA also comes under that bracket. Here are some of the best practices in testing we can adopt for a successful QA in an off shored agile team.
* No language barriers.Rely on English or other conceivable language. It is important as agile is all about communication. The testers review the stories and story tests to make sure the stories are consistent and testable, and can go back to the customer with questions. So for this smooth conversation language shouldn’t be a barrier.
* When organizing a dedicated team for QA choose the most appropriate skills for your project .It is all about picking up the most talented from the pool. The onsite company can select the right testers after personal interviewing and necessary tests.
* Synchronize the offshore with the onsite business hours. Builds and test runs can be scheduled to be ready by offshore mornings so that the analysis on any failures is complete and ready to be picked up by onsite mornings.
* Focus on short iterations and quick feedback cycles. Keep up with development iterations and regression testing. Do upfront testing, i.e. test-driven development and unit testing.
* Incorporate a high degree of automation, particularly around regression testing and continuous integration. Use lightweight regression testing tools. Sometimes, due to the size of the product, it is not practical to run the entire suite of regression tests because it simply takes too long.
Skilled and experienced dedicated testers are an invaluable part of any good Agile team. Applying their expertise and using some of the approaches outlined in this article can help in ensuring successful delivery and ultimately, customer satisfaction.