A Qualitative Empirical Investigation of Contributing Success Factors for Software Testing Outsourcing Projects

Abstract

Software testing outsourcing is becoming attractive among organisations that desire to gain high quality products within reasonable cost while allowing testing experts to assure its quality. Despite these promising advantages however, organisations have yet to learn the factors that contribute to such projects’ success. The necessary planning and actions could not thus be taken towards the effort. Consequently, software testing outsourcing projects still fail. This study aimed to address this concern by collating the factors from previous research. The investigation continued by confirming the factors besides discovering other relevant factors from software testing practitioners. This study adopted qualitative approach where it employed semi-structured interviews involving five practitioners, who represented both client and vendor. The data were analysed using content analysis. The results show that there are two aspects to be considered, namely Process and People. The former contains nine factors and the latter comprises four factors. Each factor has specific elements, which delineates the characteristics or roles that it owns. The findings provide practitioners with understanding of conducting software testing outsourcing projects effectively.

Transformational Leadership and Project Success: A Mediating Role of Public Service Motivation

“…Researchers have focused on PS criteria to evaluate a project’s success or investigate critical success factors (Ika, 2009). Many researchers have examined the critical success factors (Ayat et al, 2021; Ismail & Razali, 2015; Khan & Khan, 2013; Pacagnella et al, 2019; Yamin & Sim, 2016). “There are few topics in the field of project management that are so frequently discussed and yet so rarely agreed upon as that of the notion of project success” (Pinto & Slevin, 1988, p. 67).…”

Current trends analysis and prioritization of success factors: a systematic literature review of ICT projects

“…Researchers investigated different sets of CSF (Stankovic et al , 2013), categorized (Ahimbisibwe et al , 2015), prioritized (Yaghoobi, 2018), and modeled these factors (Sudhakar, 2012) to improve the success rate of projects. Different methodologies such as quantitative approaches (Chow and Cao, 2008; Stankovic et al , 2013), qualitative approaches (Omar et al , 2016; Ismail and Razali, 2015), multi-methods and holistic strategies (Remus and Wiener, 2010), and Bayesian decision-support models, (Gingnell et al , 2014) were used to investigate and quantify CSFs to avoid the associated risks and improve the project success rate. The review of multiple studies including the current study shows that interest of researchers has increased significantly in the subject of project success in ICT sector (Ika, 2009; Warren, 2016).…”