A Framework for Managing Software Testing Outsourcing Projects

Software testing aims to ensure that the software produced is reliable and able to function correctly. In order to do so, the testing execution requires experts and technology that might not be available within an organisation. Therefore, shifting to outsourcing for testing is one preferred option. This alternative provides benefits such as testing expertise, costs and time reduction, better testing technology and high-quality software products. Translating these benefits into practice has, however, proved challenging. Some testing outsourcing projects have failed outright. These projects either exceed the specified time or the allocated budget or failed to deliver the anticipated quality. This paper therefore intends to address this concern by providing guidance in managing software testing outsourcing projects in the form of a framework based on identified success factors. Previous studies have collected the success factors from theoretical and empirical perspectives. The investigation continues by ratifying the factors via software testing and project management experts from both the client and vendor sides. In order to develop the framework, this study adopted a qualitative approach, in which semi-structured interviews were employed to confirm the factors. The data were then analysed using content analysis. The framework consists of two aspects, namely People and Process. Four factors make up the People aspect, while another ten constitute the Process aspect. Each factor contains elements, which represent either the roles that should be played or activities that should be conducted. This framework contributes to the understanding of conducting successful software testing outsourcing projects. It could also act as a reference for future research in the software testing domain

A document based traceability model for test management

Software testing has became more complicated in the emergence of distributed network, real-time environment, third party software enablers and the need to test system at multiple integration levels. These scenarios have created more concern over the quality of software testing. The quality of software has been deteriorating due to inefficient and ineffective testing activities. One of the main flaws is due to ineffective use of test management to manage software documentations. In documentations, it is difficult to detect and trace bugs in some related documents of which traceability is the major concern. Currently, various studies have been conducted on test management, however very few have focused on document traceability in particular to support the error propagation with respect to documentation. The objective of this thesis is to develop a new traceability model that integrates software engineering documents to support test management. The artefacts refer to requirements, design, source code, test description and test result. The proposed model managed to tackle software traceability in both forward and backward propagations by implementing multi-bidirectional pointer. This platform enabled the test manager to navigate and capture a set of related artefacts to support test management process. A new prototype was developed to facilitate observation of software traceability on all related artefacts across the entire documentation lifecycle. The proposed model was then applied to a case study of a finished software development project with a complete set of software documents called the On-Board Automobile (OBA). The proposed model was evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively using the feature analysis, precision and recall, and expert validation. The evaluation results proved that the proposed model and its prototype were justified and significant to support test management