Studying the Influence of Culture on Outsourced, Offshored Software-Testing Practice: An Ethnographic Approach

The practice of outsourcing software testing tooffshore companies has grown significantly. Moreover, theoutsourced, offshored software testing (OOST) practice demands that test engineers at the vendor organization adopt their client's (or potential users') perspective to perform thetesting tasks effectively. However, vendor test engineers andclients (users) have different cultures and thus, may havedifferent understandings and expectations. These differencesmay influence the way testing is performed and thus, impactfactors such as the quality of the testing (and product)and productivity. Because recent studies indicate that cultureappears to have a greater influence on the outsourced, offshoredsoftware-engineering practice than originally envisioned, it isimportant to study culture's influence on OOST practice.However, most studies on outsourcing and offshoring considerculture in the context of cultural dimensions such as Hofstede's,which significantly limits the meaning of culture. Hence, it is necessary to study culture's influence on OOST by adopting anon-dimensional perspective of culture so that the limitationsof the existing cultural studies can be addressed. This research will conduct an ethnographically-informed study of client andvendor teams involved in OOST practice to understand what and how cultural factors influence the practice using the cultureas-models perspective. The goal is to build conceptual culturalmodels of client and vendor testing teams, so that such modelscan be used for comparisons to better understand how culturesupports and causes barriers in the current OOST practice.