Quadruple Factors Interference and Its Effects on Quality of Outsourcing Testing: A Case Study

The share of IT companies in the global market has been increasing and many organizations are moving to outsource their software development projects to off-shore vendors. Recently, the IT sector in Palestine has been gaining much ground with many software development companies specializing in software development outsourcing services. Maintaining high-quality and robust software products has always been a key success factor in the outsourcing sector. Software testing is considered to be the main phase in which teams can assure high quality of software products. Therefore, we did an exploratory multiple-case study and this study involves four Palestinian software outsourcing companies of different domain. We provide insights about factors that affect the quality of software testing practice, and explore applied testing techniques, methods and confronted challenges. The results reveal that there is big attention toward software testing as software development companies are investing more effort, time, and technical resources into their quality assurance teams. Additionally, among the applied software testing methods, more attention needs to be directed towards test automation. Moreover, more theoretical and technical courses targeting software quality assurance should be included in national Palestinian universities' curriculum. Finally, we propose a new model that can help practitioners to enhance the quality of their outsourced software products.