An Industrial Experience on the Application of Distributed Testing in an Agile Software Development Environment

Software engineering is by nature a highly collaborative activity. However, this collaboration is more difficult when the teams are geographically separated, as several factors, such as work-time, cultural differences, communication, technical capability, among others, may impact on its success. Moreover, each activity in the software development process has specific needs in a distributed software development (DSD) environment. In this paper, we report an industrial experience of a testing team separated geographically in the context of a software project that followed an agile method. The agile testing process was adapted to deal with the DSD characteristics. As results, we observed the feasibility and success of applying distributed testing in an agile software project when dealing with aspects such as communication, coordination, collaboration, task distribution, and tests automation. The challenges, results, and lessons learned from this experience are discussed.