Independent Offshore Qa: Adding Value To The Distributed Agile Environment

In todays distributed Agile environment, emphasis is leaning towards doing away with

independent offshore QA teams given the overall project time and budget constraints; thus it is time for us to sit up and proclaim our right place in the Agile methodology.

Today as a QA Testing team we have broadened our expertise horizon to way past the traditional Functional Quality tag and have effectively increased our mode and impact of communication leading to bridging the offshore-onsite gap, thus promoting enhanced product quality in reduced time frame. The offshore software testing and QA is helping the new onsite developers to come up to speed. We are acting as ready to help happy mentors. With the constantly evolving IT industry, we as testers are also evolving and adapting to new technologies and approaches to increase the product quality and provide agility.

Let us now delve a little deeper and uncover the nuances of a successful onsite-offshore agile partnership.

We all know the backbone of any agile practice is collaborative communication. But here the big question is not what but how? So lets together look at the how options and possibilities;

It is time for us to compliment the formal emails with different communication tools (Skype, team viewer, Google+, etc) to lend our business relationships a warmer touch. Collaboration like this can help us realise the goals of effective defect prediction/prevention and zero defect vision. Video conferences and screen sharing help us understand and respect each others viewpoints better

After making my point about the interactive approach, its time to increase the value of the Offshore QA in Agile;

Miscommunication or lack of understanding of the process/project is a major agile bottleneck. But the solution to this roadblock lies with the QA team. The QA Testing team can create and maintain a data repository with video tutorials to keep the whole team up to date with the latest project/process information. As it is said Information is money in software development, so such knowledge base articles/videos come in very handy not just to the QA team but to the entire product team..

When we look at an independent Offshore QA team in agile, we actually look for a package deal that is more than the Functional Quality tag. Independent Offshore software testing and QA has to significantly increase its impact and double up as mentors, trainers and reliable knowledge experts.

In short giving our business relationships a warmer touch and learning the art of informal meaningful product/process related conversations can really bring out the agility we all talk and strive to achieve. And with the agility in place, the need of the hour shifts to increasing our tools of the trade.

With the above objectives achieved, even dreaming about giving up a dedicated Independent Agile QA team would only spell doomsday for any organisation. In this world of cut throat competition and rising prices, quality is what keeps a customer loyal and happy.

A multitasking, communicatively collaborative Independent Offshore QA team takes an organisation closer to the Zero Defect Vision in distributed Agile Environment.

by: Knowledge Sharing Team

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