The Effects of Time Pressure on Quality in Software Development: An Agency Model
Information Systems Research
Culture Surprises in Remote Software Development Teams
Queue - Distributed Development
Managing cross-cultural issues in global software outsourcing
Communications of the ACM - Human-computer etiquette
Software engineering under deadline pressure
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
Impacts of the Organizational Model on Testing: Three Industrial Cases
Empirical Software Engineering
Queue - Quality Assurance
Improving software testing by observing practice
Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering
ICGSE '06 Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on Global Software Engineering
Exploring the Assumed Benefits of Global Software Development
ICGSE '06 Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on Global Software Engineering
ICSE '07 Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering
Awareness in the Wild: Why Communication Breakdowns Occur
ICGSE '07 Proceedings of the International Conference on Global Software Engineering
Software Testing and Global Industry: Future Paradigms
Software Testing and Global Industry: Future Paradigms
Testing in the Wild: The Social and Organisational Dimensions of Real World Practice
Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Empirical evidence in global software engineering: a systematic review
Empirical Software Engineering
Studying human and social aspects of testing in a service-based software company: case study
Proceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering
Outsourced, Offshored Software-Testing Practice: Vendor-Side Experiences
ICGSE '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Global Software Engineering
Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Intercultural Collaboration
Information and Software Technology
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Context: In the era of globally-distributed software engineering, the practice of global software testing (GST) has witnessed increasing adoption. Although there have been ethnographic studies of the development aspects of global software engineering, there have been fewer studies of GST, which, to succeed, can require dealing with unique challenges. Objective: To address this limitation of existing studies, we conducted, and in this paper, report the findings of, a study of a vendor organization involved in one kind of GST practice: outsourced, offshored software testing. Method: We conducted an ethnographically-informed study of three vendor-side testing teams over a period of 2months. We used methods, such as interviews and participant observations, to collect the data and the thematic-analysis approach to analyze the data. Findings: Our findings describe how the participant test engineers perceive software testing and deadline pressures, the challenges that they encounter, and the strategies that they use for coping with the challenges. The findings reveal several interesting insights. First, motivation and appreciation play an important role for our participants in ensuring that high-quality testing is performed. Second, intermediate onshore teams increase the degree of pressure experienced by the participant test engineers. Third, vendor team participants perceive productivity differently from their client teams, which results in unproductive-productivity experiences. Lastly, participants encounter quality-dilemma situations for various reasons. Conclusion: The study findings suggest the need for (1) appreciating test engineers' efforts, (2) investigating the team structure's influence on pressure and the GST practice, (3) understanding culture's influence on other aspects of GST, and (4) identifying and addressing quality-dilemma situations.