During Q-Merit Award dinner I attended last month which was part of Software Testing Conference (SOFTEC2012), there was a keynote by Dr. Jasbir S. Dhaliwal in which he raised some ideas related to software testing.  Those ideas really need from us (testers) to spend sometime to think and to do brainstorming about them. Actually, not only testers should do this. All project team including developers, engineers, project managers and even management need to think about those ideas.

Here are three ideas Dr. Jasbir shared:

1. Outsourcing: Development or testing?

Several companies choose the option for outsourcing. In most cases, those companies think about outsourcing of testing and doing the development by their staff. Therefore, they invest money to develop their development team. The question is: Why not the other way? Why not investing money to develop the testing team and to outsource the development instead? There are a lot of companies in the market that offer development services but few ones offering testing services. Once the company invests money to develop their own testing team, they will be able to make sure that any work done by the development company is according to the requirements. In addition, this is really a long term investment since for sure more and more project will be there for the company to outsource and in all these caes, testing team will be ready for testing.

2. Testers working with architectures and networkers other than developers:

We all know that testers should work with developers in order to get the job done. However, there are also lots of issues related to the architecture of the solution. Only (experienced) testers will be able to find the issues there. In addition, working with networking people including IT and infrastructure people will help to find the issues in those areas. The good thing is that testers will be able to find the issues so early in the project. Therefore, the coset to fix the issues will be tremendously  reduced and hence the Return on Investment (ROI) of the project will increase.

3. Service-level Agreement (SLA) for testing and outsourcing:

Currently, there is no SLA for testing or outsourcing. Dr. Jasbir raised this issue and it is really interesting. How do we define the  agreement on the testing activities done for a certain project? When to agree or disagree and what criteria are there on which we base our decision? The same goes once a company goes for outsourcing. How the company offering the service will know they match the agreement criteria. Also, on which criteria we should base our decision to agree or disagree. Currently no specific answer for all those inquires.

I am posting this topic here and looking forward to see some feedback. Please feel free to share your opinion. We may refer back to Dr. Jasbir and get his point of view on our thoughts.

All the best.