Studying the Influence of Culture on Outsourced, Offshored Software-Testing Practice: An Ethnographic Approach

The practice of outsourcing software testing to offshore companies has grown significantly. Moreover, the outsourced, offshored software testing (OOST) practice demands that test engineers at the vendor organization adopt their client´s (or potential users´) perspective to perform the testing tasks effectively. However, vendor test engineers and clients (users) have different cultures and thus, may have different understandings and expectations. These differences may influence the way testing is performed and thus, impact factors such as the quality of the testing (and product) and productivity. Because recent studies indicate that culture appears to have a greater influence on the outsourced, offshored software-engineering practice than originally envisioned, it is important to study culture´s influence on OOST practice. However, most studies on outsourcing and offshoring consider culture in the context of cultural dimensions such as Hofstede´s, which significantly limits the meaning of culture. Hence, it is necessary to study culture´s influence on OOST by adopting a non-dimensional perspective of culture so that the limitations of the existing cultural studies can be addressed. This research will conduct an ethnographically-informed study of client and vendor teams involved in OOST practice to understand what and how cultural factors influence the practice using the culture-as-models perspective. The goal is to build conceptual cultural models of client and vendor testing teams, so that such models can be used for comparisons to better understand how culture supports and causes barriers in the current OOST practice.