Software testing and global industry

by Valentine Casey

Today software development has truly become a globally sourced commodity. This trend has been facilitated by the availability of highly skilled software professionals in low cost locations in Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Far East. Organisations endeavouring to leverage the opportunities this provides and to avail of the benefits of establishing operations close to emerging markets have embraced this strategy in large numbers. Software testing plays a key role in delivering high quality products and is a labour intensive, complex and expensive activity. In the context of Global Software Development (GSD) to date testing has been perceived as a well defined task that is relatively straightforward and lends itself to being outsourced or offshored. This volume considers this specific topic and demonstrates that testing in a GSD environment is not a simple activity. It is prone to be negatively impacted by all the factors associated with distributed software development.This work a