Experience report: An industrial experience report on test outsourcing practices

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 o...

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Main Authors: XIA, Xin, David LO, KOCHHAR, Pavneet Singh, XING, Zhenchang, WANG, Xinyu, LI, Shanping
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Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3090
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4090/viewcontent/issre15_outsourcing.pdf
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spelling sg-smu-ink.sis_research-40902020-12-07T07:54:49Z Experience report: An industrial experience report on test outsourcing practices XIA, Xin David LO, KOCHHAR, Pavneet Singh XING, Zhenchang WANG, Xinyu LI, Shanping 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. 2015-11-01T07:00:00Z text application/pdf https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3090 info:doi/10.1109/ISSRE.2015.7381830 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4090/viewcontent/issre15_outsourcing.pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems eng Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Software Engineering
institution Singapore Management University
building SMU Libraries
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider SMU Libraries
collection InK@SMU
language English
topic Software Engineering
spellingShingle Software Engineering
XIA, Xin
David LO,
KOCHHAR, Pavneet Singh
XING, Zhenchang
WANG, Xinyu
LI, Shanping
Experience report: An industrial experience report on test outsourcing practices
description 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.
format text
author XIA, Xin
David LO,
KOCHHAR, Pavneet Singh
XING, Zhenchang
WANG, Xinyu
LI, Shanping
author_facet XIA, Xin
David LO,
KOCHHAR, Pavneet Singh
XING, Zhenchang
WANG, Xinyu
LI, Shanping
author_sort XIA, Xin
title Experience report: An industrial experience report on test outsourcing practices
title_short Experience report: An industrial experience report on test outsourcing practices
title_full Experience report: An industrial experience report on test outsourcing practices
title_fullStr Experience report: An industrial experience report on test outsourcing practices
title_full_unstemmed Experience report: An industrial experience report on test outsourcing practices
title_sort experience report: an industrial experience report on test outsourcing practices
publisher Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
publishDate 2015
url https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3090
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4090/viewcontent/issre15_outsourcing.pdf
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