Outsourcing and knowledge management in software testing

Authors:
Katja Karhu;Ossi Taipale;Kari Smolander
Affiliations:
Lappeenranta University of Technology, Department of Information Technology, Laboratory of Information Processing, Lappeenranta, Finland;Lappeenranta University of Technology, Department of Information Technology, Laboratory of Information Processing, Lappeenranta, Finland;Lappeenranta University of Technology, Department of Information Technology, Laboratory of Information Processing, Lappeenranta, Finland
Venue:
EASE'07 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
Year:
2007

Citing 12
Cited 3

Software engineering (5th ed.)

Software engineering (5th ed.)
Software testing in the real world: improving the process

Software testing in the real world: improving the process
Using case study research to build theories of IT implementation

Proceedings of the IFIP TC8 WG 8.2 international conference on Information systems and qualitative research
Automated software testing: introduction, management, and performance

Automated software testing: introduction, management, and performance
A set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies in information systems

MIS Quarterly - Special issue on intensive research in information systems
Qualitative Methods in Empirical Studies of Software Engineering

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Testing Computer Software, Second Edition

Testing Computer Software, Second Edition
Motivation, Knowledge Transfer, and Organizational Forms

Organization Science
Outsourcing Application Software: A Knowledge Management Perspective

HICSS '98 Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences-Volume 6 - Volume 6
Managing conflict in software testing

Communications of the ACM - Multimodal interfaces that flex, adapt, and persist
Factors Affecting Software Testing Time Schedule

ASWEC '06 Proceedings of the Australian Software Engineering Conference
Improving software testing by observing practice

Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering

Test case selection and prioritization: risk-based or design-based?

Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
A proposal of a process model to create a test factory

WOSQ'09 Proceedings of the Seventh ICSE conference on Software quality
An architectural model for software testing lesson learned systems

Information and Software Technology

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The objective of this empirical study was to explore outsourcing in software testing and shape hypotheses that explain the association between outsourcing and knowledge management. First, a survey of testing practices was conducted and 26 organizational units (OUs) were interviewed. From this sample, five OUs were further selected for an in-depth case study. The study used qualitative grounded theory as its research method and the data was collected from 41 theme-based interviews. The analysis yielded hypotheses that included that the business orientation of an OU affects outsourcing of testing and the knowledge management strategy, outsourcing seems to be more effective when independent testing agencies have enough domain knowledge, and outsourcing verification tasks is more difficult than outsourcing validation tasks. The results of this study can be used in developing the knowledge management strategy and as guidance in making outsourcing decisions.