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I have worked on a couple of projects where we had to use an offshore team for QA. The biggest problem was written instruction comprehension: the offshore team

by bcrl 5y ago

I have worked on a couple of projects where we had to use an offshore team for QA. The biggest problem was written instruction comprehension: the offshore team simply could not follow instructions written in perfectly coherent english in an email. The only way we made progress was to set up a call where we walked the offshore team through the steps in the email - as in literally telling them to "run this command, then run that command". It was hell as we kept getting lambasted for not meeting our deliverables because the offshore team couldn't follow simple instructions to run a few scripts and record their output.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
That raises numerous questions, and all of them indicate bad management. Who is in charge of that team? Is there no bilingual, western trained person that can mange these problems? Are they not understanding what needs to be done, or are they missing that many skills? Do they not recieve training? If training is not helping, why were these candidates selected in the first place? If these were the best candidates avaliable, why was that offshore office created to begin with?
- bcrl 5y ago
  We had no control over the other team. They were already responsible for QA of most of the system, but most of that just consisted of running existing QA test cases and reporting when they failed. As we were implementing new network protocols that they did not have existing test cases for, the work QA was responsible for was rather more complex. The issues were typically of the form "run this test script and tell us what happened for you" => "it failed" and then provided no useful information. Each step was a 24 rtt nightmare until we pushed for conference calls at 11pm local time for us. At the time we also heard of a horror tales from the offshore team. In one case a new hire had gone through the interview process, accepted the job offer, showed up for the first day, just left and never came back after a better offer came in. Suffice it to say that the offshore QA team was not exactly high quality without the ability to retain employees. It was not like the QA teams I've encountered at other jobs where QA writes a lot of their own testing infrastructure and are on an equal footing with the developers. Sadly they were more like a glorified checklist processing system, and were probably in over their heads.

by bcrl 5y ago

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

That raises numerous questions, and all of them indicate bad management. Who is in charge of that team? Is there no bilingual, western trained person that can mange these problems? Are they not understanding what needs to be done, or are they missing that many skills? Do they not recieve training? If training is not helping, why were these candidates selected in the first place? If these were the best candidates avaliable, why was that offshore office created to begin with?

bcrl 5y ago
We had no control over the other team. They were already responsible for QA of most of the system, but most of that just consisted of running existing QA test cases and reporting when they failed. As we were implementing new network protocols that they did not have existing test cases for, the work QA was responsible for was rather more complex. The issues were typically of the form "run this test script and tell us what happened for you" => "it failed" and then provided no useful information. Each step was a 24 rtt nightmare until we pushed for conference calls at 11pm local time for us. At the time we also heard of a horror tales from the offshore team. In one case a new hire had gone through the interview process, accepted the job offer, showed up for the first day, just left and never came back after a better offer came in. Suffice it to say that the offshore QA team was not exactly high quality without the ability to retain employees. It was not like the QA teams I've encountered at other jobs where QA writes a lot of their own testing infrastructure and are on an equal footing with the developers. Sadly they were more like a glorified checklist processing system, and were probably in over their heads.