Using grounded theory to understand testing engineers´ soft skills of third-party software testing centers

Testing engineers in the third-party software testing center are often puzzled with some non-technical problems, such as, how to deal with the developers´ reactance, and how to meet the end users´ satisfaction, during the software testing process. Unfortunately, little attention has been paid to solve such kind of problems. In this paper, we argue that the high quality and high productivity pursued by software testing require us not only to emphasize the hard skills of testing engineers but also to enhance their soft skills in an appropriate and systematic way, which should deserve more attention. We furthermore argue that attention should be paid to obtain qualitative insight and feedback from testing engineers and to explore in what way to acquire the useful information. We conduct a qualitative study to explore and understand testing engineers´ soft skills from five different test teams based on multidimensional perspective levels under the analysis of grounded theory. The on-going research work´s agenda is given, several research challenges are analyzed and at last future work is proposed.