Optimizing Dual-Shore SQA Resource and Activities in Offshore Outsourced Software Projects

Although offshore outsourcing software projects from USA and Europe to India, China or Russia is prevalent currently, software quality assurance activities cost more and last longer due to the communication and coordination issues in distributed environment. Having part of SQA team on-site with user is essential and the trade-off must be made between the cost and quality of service. This paper introduces our research work on how to reduce the SQA resource cost and improve the user satisfaction with optimized SQA resource and activities. Distributed groups shared the layered domain knowledge, deliverables and user requirements were arranged in layers. On-site SQA activities were prioritized to be performed. Since large amount of SQA effort was performed by offshore SQA group, only 10% SQA persons were on-site with user in Lattice project. While user requirement was satisfied in time and deliverables were of high quality, the entire cost of SQA resource was reduced due to the shortened life cycle and minimized on-site SQA group