Improving the software testing skills of novices during onboarding through social transparency

Inexperienced software developers — for example, under-graduates entering the workforce — exhibit a lack of testing skills. They have trouble understanding and applying basic testing techniques. These inexperienced developers are hired by software com-panies, where this lack of testing skills has already been rec-ognized. Companies allocate valuable resources and invest time and money in different onboarding strategies to intro-duce new hires to the organization’s testing practices. How-ever, if the lack of testing skills is not addressed properly, the new hire is left to her own devices. This hinders her in becoming a high-quality engineer for the software company. This thesis proposes to improve the onboarding strategies with traits of social transparency in order to specifically ad-dress testing issues of inexperienced new hires. Social trans-parency has been shown to influence the testing behavior of development teams on a social coding site. An environment that is open for discussion helps newcomers to understand and adapt a team’s testing culture. Tailoring the onboarding process to better address testing skills of new hires makes it more effective and more effi-cient. This reduces the danger of carrying new hire’s testing deficits into commercial software development

Effective Strategies for Managing Continuous Consultant Turnover in IT Project Teams

Information Technology project managers have found that collective turnover of consultants lowers code quality, increases knowledge loss and negatively impacts team performance. Within the last decade, companies have begun to see that offshore consultants have a turnover rate greater than 26%, more than double the rates for the rest of the IT consulting industry. Collective turnover also puts additional pressure on the project team, causing work exhaustion and thus additional turnover. The purpose of this single case study was to explore strategies that 6 successful project managers utilized to limit and reduce the impact of collective turnover of their hybrid sourced project teams. Participants were selected through purposeful sampling, based on career experiences and history of successful project execution. Data collection was completed through semi structured face to face interviews, acquisition of company documents including knowledge transfer plans, onboarding documents and turnover statistics. Data were analyzed using coding and key word analysis. Three themes emerged from data collection on the impact collective turnover has on hybrid sourced project teams. First, collective turnover of consultants decreased team performance. Second, improving global team dynamics reduced the negative impact of collective turnover. Last using knowledge transfer tools and project documentation practices reduced the negative impact of collective turnover. This research may contribute to effectively social change by providing managers information and techniques to improve global team dynamics and remove cultural barriers from the workplace