One of the best assets an organization has is its employees. But these employees can become a liability as well, if the management team is not capable of managing different teams, effectively. A successful organization is the one that cares about its personnel and does know how to get the most out of the employee’s potential without even hurting them. As with the growing demands of users about quality, unique feature set, and much more wish lists. Organizations’ workloads are increasing and they found having assistance from third-parties as to the best way out to manage the workloads and burden effectively, while not compromising on the user’s needs and expectations. When it comes to ensuring the quality of software products, many business owners in the software development domain, found acquiring services from third-party vendors or having offshore software testing services, as one of the best options. But these organizations are unaware of the threats that offshore testing teams can pose if they are not handled or lead effectively by the host organization. Managing personnel in-house is simple and easy as compared to manage a group of people abroad. You have to be very careful and intelligent about how you can get the most out of your offshore teams and achieve your desired testing goals. How to come up with a win-win situation i.e where both organizations can achieve their desired goals.
Because of this situation, management processes have evolved respectively. Outsourcing companies often establish several offices across the world to extend their reach for customers and facilitate many associated issues.
If you are involved in managing a software testing team located in different offshore offices, then the below-mentioned tips would surely help you to get rid of stress and tension;
Have know-how about your QA team members – If you don’t want to face any difficulty in handling a quality assurance team abroad, the first and the best thing you can do is to get yourself introduced to each of the quality assurance team members. Starting with the correct spelling and pronunciation of colleagues’ names, try to better understand them, and let them know each other. This will make your QA team feel as you’re trying to engage with them and a more close relation would take place while communication between both parties will strengthen. It is recommended that your QA team members make a simple and single slide about themselves, including their photo and some basic information. This is a great way to know your QA team members, their skill set, technical knowledge, certifications, and side interests.
Eliminate the language barriers – It’s hard to communicate with people who are far away yet not impossible at all. When it comes to partner with offshore teams for a highly sensitive project like software testing, soft skills become more and more valuable and important. Sometimes, language barriers take place between partners because of the diversity of cultures. But this challenge can also be tackled if a universally speaking language can be learned by both parties i.e English. Because In most of the areas on the globe, English is being spoken either as a native language or as a professional language. This way both the parties can save a heap and get solve half of their problems.
Problem management process – The market is overloaded with a specific problem and issue handling tools, to track, record, manage the software defects easily. Most of the testing projects can get easily completed with the help of these tools because they can be operated from onshore or offshore locations. However, many projects are carried out without implementing the use of special issue management tools for resolving the functional, technical, and business-related problems that the offshore team may encounter during the testing phase. This is why you should ensure that your offshore team uses certain web-driven document management systems correctly.
Effective Documentation Management – Develop a set of guidelines for document management, covering test scenarios, test scripts, test execution, and result documentation. For this purpose, it is recommended to the offshore companies to opt for a test management tool that well aligns with the project requirements and your business goals of their customer organization.
