Michael Hackett's Blog Post Training for Offshore Testing Teams (Part 4 of 4)

The Training Areas

Staff Retention and "Train the Trainer"

Companies are increasingly using training programs as a means of increasing staff retention. In most popular offshoring countries, jobs are plentiful. The promise of training programs on important topics like working with Americans, technical English, software development lifecycles and software engineering best practices, and software QA and testing can have a very positive effect on staff retention.

Be ready for unexpected challenges. You may spend a month at your offshore location training your test team on everything from bug entry to typical users, only to have 50% staff turnover in a few months. Test production drops, bug finding drops. What do you do, another month of training? That will set you back in both your project and in your own work.

With high turnover rates the norm right now, you can prepare to make training the next team members easier on you and reduce the risk of untrained staff. Begin a train-the-trainer program with your best test team members. Give extra training, documentation, PowerPoint presentations, reading material, and specialist US-team contacts to specific test team members. Have a bug database expert, a customer expert, a test technology expert, etc. After working with these staff on the training material they can co-teach with you or on their own.

I recommend videotaping your training sessions as a tool for train-the-trainer. Watching video tapes of training is a great tool for new trainers to review and repeat. It is not, though, usually a great tool for training the staff itself. Unless you will be making high quality video presentations with great sound, integrated with slides, learning and content retention from watching long videos of your training will probably be low. You may also want to provide an incentive to your high-potential trainers-to-be with a trip to the domestic office for extra training to take back to their team. This is a powerful incentive and may help reduce attrition of key staff.

Training Material and Training Sessions

Don't expect that sending one Test Lead to your offshore office and having that person blast through your standard new tester training will suffice. It will not. Plan the training program in phases. How long does it take for new domestic staff to ramp up to become effective? With new work processes, different cultural references, working in a foreign language, and training overload, count on a longer training and ramp up time for the offshore team.

You will probably need to change some of your standard training content. I recommend reviewing your training slide-by-slide, looking for idioms, culturally inappropriate language or images.

If your training on Exploratory testing has an image of Detective %#*# Tracy, that won't work outside North America. A slide saying: "This test case kills two birds with one stone" will need the idiom removed and the slide rewritten! The trainer will need to stay alert that the material is cleansed of most idioms and the delivery is conducted with straightforward language. I once conducted a three day training that was simultaneously translated into Chinese to one subset of students. Although unnerving, it was successful by all accounts even though the timing and tempo were completely thrown off. I was often not fully sure the translator completely understood my content as she was translating. We tried to make a game of test-the-translator by occasionally having students repeat back to me what the translator said as well as they could in English for me to make sure they were understanding.

You will also need to change your delivery. Course delivery should be slower and use more training games and exercises. You will also need to use a few methods to check for comprehension other than asking "do you understand?" in front of the group. Particularly in Asia, no matter the level of understanding from a total lack of understanding to full comprehension, the answer will be an unequivocal Yes'. A class participant may feel pressured to say they understand, even if they do not, for fear of being judged by the class as not being smart or not speaking English well enough. You may need to give some quizzes, ask individuals questions outside of the classroom setting, or add more class exercises where students can demonstrate their understanding.

Conclusion

You can set yourself up to have less stress and management headaches during offshore testing projects by effectively training your test team in a variety of disciplines. Since the needs of the offshore team are different, the training must go beyond the off-the-shelf training for new test engineers on the domestic team. In addition to training the offshore team on using your processes as well as test case and bug tracking systems, focus on domain knowledge and test technology.

Do not neglect to conduct training sessions on project, productivity, and communication expectations. Training your US staff on how to better work with your offshore team will help the test effort on both sites. Establish subject matter experts on your offshore team, matching individuals with areas of expertise: a process/documentation/bug tracking expert, a domain expert, a test expert, etc. Anticipate and mitigate staff turnover by setting up a train-the-trainer program for your offshore team. Use long term training plans on QA, Test Methods, English, Doing business with Americans, SLDCs, etc. as an incentive for staff retention.

Offshore testing is and will remain one of the greatest challenges facing domestic test teams, and training is the best tool to reduce project risks and help make your global team as effective as possible.

Michael Hackett's Blog Posting Training for Offshore Testing Teams (Part 3 of 3)

The Training Areas

English Training

If you happen to be in a country where excellent communication skills in English are hard to find (most places except India), training in English is critical. Make sure you have some people on the team who were hired because, in addition to their other skills, they are excellent English speakers. This is needed for writing bug reports, status reports and ease of phone communication. They may also act as the lead or moderator of phone meetings.

Cross-Cultural Differences and Working with the Domestic Team

Cross-cultural training for the offshore team is often skipped for a variety of reasons. It may be considered unimportant, too time consuming, too sensitive, not urgent, or it may be assumed that the offshore team already knows enough. Skipping this training is a big mistake! There are a variety of cultural issues that must be addressed in training ranging from definitions of customer satisfaction to understanding group dynamics.

The understanding of customer satisfaction for your domestic team is likely to be very different from the understanding of the offshore team. You have two bridges to cross here. First, you must train developers to test from a customer's perspective. Second, you must train them to understand the customer's expectations. You should train your offshore team on the purpose of and types of bugs found during usability testing. If usability and customer satisfaction are critical to project success, you may consider having the domestic team conduct these tests, or hire some usability testing services.

There are a wide variety of issues that, depending on your offshore team's cultural background, can sink a project. Special and delicate training is needed in:

• The importance of getting the whole story and not half truths
• The importance of building trust among all teams
• How to say no (the ability to say no varies between cultures)
• How to question a person of authority - for example, questioning the domestic test lead may be looked upon as rude in some cultures
• Speaking up to voice opinions and suggestions on testing and process
• How to think outside the box
• Understanding group dynamics, from how to do brainstorming, to working with or without group consensus

Interestingly, on the topic of working with Americans, I have found, in every instance, teams are well acquainted with many of the differences between their work culture and that of Americans. These are usually deep-rooted, sensitive topics. In practice, a strategy of meeting halfway works well. It is important to note that this training is needed for both domestic and offshore teams. When all teams understand the cultural differences of their counterparts, personal fears can be allayed and the teams will work together more effectively.

Training Your Domestic Staff

The domestic team also needs training on soft skills and process if the project is to be successful. A key training topic is better communication, including:

• How to conduct virtual meetings
• Status reporting
• Importance of kickoff meetings
• Using instant messaging (IM) for standard communication

Training on process should include:

• Processes for working with offshore teams
• The importance of sticking to internal team processes
• Improving documentation
• Build processes, including acceptance testing and transfer
• What to do when the offshore team hits blocking issues and the domestic team is unavailable
• What the offshore team can do during downtime

When you have developed your list of cross-cultural rough spots, train the local team on ways to recognize and deal with them. Tackling these issues can be difficult and sensitive but very worthwhile.

The domestic team must be aware of how their behavior will be interpreted by the offshore team. In team meetings, Americans often make jokes, political comments, and openly criticize management. In some countries this will be viewed as disrespectful and always inappropriate. I have seen offshore test teams lose respect for the domestic team based on conversations we may find trivial. Training can make the domestic team more aware of their own behavior and how it is viewed by the offshore team, preventing friction and misunderstandings that can put the project at risk.

Top 5 Cultural & Communication Issues

Use training on communication or work ethics to open doors to understanding and communication. As a very practical exercise you can approach learning to work together with less stress by doing an exercise I call Top 5. It is important you do this exercise during training for both the US and offshore teams. In this exercise you brainstorm the top 5 things that get in the way of excellent work conditions. After the brainstorm you then come up with ideas about how to eliminate these issues. Promise to bring these problem and solution items back to the counterpart teams.

An example Top 5 cross cultural problems exercise:
Offshore team in Country X Top 5 issues:

1. The US team is always in a rush and telling us to go faster but we cannot make mistakes.
2. They forget to tell us things that happen and we get frustrated when we do things wrong and they want us to work late to fix their forgetting.
3. We are so constrained by the test cases they sent us we feel bored.
4. They are always adding things to the project even at the end. It is a problem that they are so unorganized.
5. We ask questions and often hear nothing at all back from them.

US-based test team Top 5 issues:

1. They drop whatever they are doing at noon and go for lunch. Whether in the middle of a meeting or a time sensitive process- it is lunchtime.
2. They don't work as fast as we do.
3. There are so many questions I cannot get my own work done anymore and am e-mailing them late into my evening.
4. They don't always tell the truth about what is going on. They tell us what we want to hear.
5. Women managing men can be difficult in their culture. We have a few women test leads.

How these items get dealt with will vary depending on team dynamics, company culture and the culture you are dealing with, among other things. The point is not that one group drops their cultural imprint on the other group and says we are right, you are wrong. The point is that each team learns how to communicate about these things, works with each other, and helps each other over hurdles. We cannot change cultures overnight, just as they cannot change us overnight. We need to be aware of difficult areas, since they are inevitable. This more difficult training will decrease stress, improve communication, provide greater work efficiency and have happier teams and greater project success.

In the fourth and final part of this article series, Michael discusses:.

• Staff Retention and Train the Trainer
• Training Material and Training Sessions

Michael Hackett's Blog Posting Training for Offshore Testing Teams (Part 2 of 4)

The Training Areas

Process

It has been said many times that off shoring forces you to be better in your organization and processes. Your offshore team needs to be trained in all aspects of your test process from communication methods, status reporting, the test case management and defect tracking systems, the build process, how much time to spend analyzing bugs to what backup work to do in case of a bad build or downtime. Also, you need to explain why certain metrics are important and what they mean to reduce fear and instill an understanding of measurement.

Part of your training should focus on setting expectations for each tester's workweek. Set ranges for how many test cases you expect completed in a day and in a week as well as how much time to spend executing documented tests versus exploratory testing, and how long it should take to complete a status report template, etc. You will also want to layout lines of communication, especially how the offshore testers will communicate with developers in other locations.

Your training must communicate expectations about requirements, the dynamic nature of software development and change control. Companies are driven by both technology and the market. Domestic test teams are both resigned to and understand the need for scope creep. I have seen many instances where an offshore team thinks the project team is naive or badly managed when project requirements change, not understanding the "agile" processes the domestic team is using to adapt throughout the development cycle. Build a training activity around requirements stability and what to do when requirements change. Here, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

Don't rely on an offshore test team's Six Sigma or CMM processes during your project. Many offshore outsourcers and even offshore divisions of US software producers have implemented strict development processes and systems of measurement to gain credibility. The overwhelming majority of US software development organizations do not use or care about these certifications. Instruct your offshore test team in your process, don't use theirs. During training compare and contrast CMM-type processes with yours to promote understanding.

Product and Domain Knowledge

The two most crucial and most difficult areas for your test team training are domain knowledge and test technologies and methods.

Given the limited time for training and the depth of knowledge needed to test effectively, getting your technically-savvy offshore team to learn about your business area, product line and customers is the toughest training task you will face. For most test teams, having a balance between testing from a business user's perspective and testing from a technical perspective is key. A good rule of thumb with offshore teams is hire for technical knowledge, train for business knowledge. Plan and budget for extensive training on the product and business domain. It will pay off!

From tasks as long and complex as writing and executing end-to-end user scenarios to simple requirement validation, I would not rely on either the current test cases or a user manual as the sole learning tools for domain knowledge. They are typically dry and not at all interactive nor do they promote the questioning and full understanding the offshore test team will need for success. A better bet is to conduct a very interactive training session about the users. Effective training will include setting up an exercise with mock users from a made-up office where different students will have different roles and tasks in using your product. Once your team understands the context in which the software is used, they will be much more effective in testing from the user perspective.

Testing Techniques

Before you develop training on testing techniques, examine your staff. What is the background of your offshore team? They are probably Computer Science college grads. The trend overseas is to almost exclusively hire computer science or information systems grads to work on software development projects. If you have not worked with offshore test teams already, get ready for a very technically skilled test staff that is very eager to learn to do your work and more. Even though the offshore test team may not know much about how to test, more than likely they are all fast learners and hungry for knowledge.

Now that more companies are sending new development projects offshore, especially consumer products, new and different testing skill sets are needed. Your training needs to take developers across the bridge to becoming testers and not developers.

It is well understood that a bug as a code issue is often different from a bug as a user issue. This topic is more about development culture rather than a quick training item. Your offshore test team needs to have a solid understanding of the differences between developer testing and tester testing as well as an understanding of quality, customer satisfaction and the cost of quality, such as the costs involved with releasing unplanned patches or making customer support calls.

How to test for buffer overflows versus developing effective user scenarios requires different training. Both are essential. Some developers have no interest in the user experience and are much more fascinated by the system level workings of the code. The user experience and the bugs normally found at the user interface may be missed, greatly reducing customer satisfaction and increasing the immediacy of patch builds.

Depending on the team, your testing technique training may need to include basics such as model-based testing, equivalence class partitioning, forced error testing, and writing user scenario and requirements-based tests. These are the easy ones.

You may also need to focus on a variety of more abstract topics including:

• Exploratory testing style- what it is, how to start, how to measure, when is it most effective?
• Test case design style such as Soap Opera testing- what is it, how to write the test cases?
• Common approaches to breaking software- such as James A. Whittaker's approaches to breaking software (www.howtobreaksoftware.com).

These training sessions on testing techniques need to be fun and creative, with emphasis on exercises, activities and games.

In Part 3 of this article series, Michael will discuss the following training areas:.

• English Training
• Cross-Cultural Differences and Working with the Domestic Team
• Training Your Domestic Staff

In the fourth and final part of this article series, Michael discusses:.

• Staff Retention and Train the Trainer
• Training Material and Training Sessions

Michael Hackett's Blog Posting - Training for Offshore Testing Teams (Part 1 of 4)

Introduction

When a US-based device maker outsourced their testing to India there was one thing they forgot: The new test team had never seen a device like theirs, had no idea how to use it, or why anyone would even buy it. The test effort failed. No surprise.

A Test Lead friend was getting only half the testing picture from status reports, frustrated with missing information, learning unpleasant surprises about what she thought was happening. She found out she have been lied to in order for a test team member to save face.

Training your offshore test team can stop or minimize these problems before they cause mid-project headaches, stress or even test project failure. But training an offshore team is different than training your domestic team. Your offshore test team is likely to be more technically skilled than your domestic test team. That's great, but that does not eliminate, or even reduce the need for training.

Perhaps most important to ensuring test project success as well as peace of mind, your offshore team will need additional training in working with the domestic teams, communication and meeting etiquette, work ethics, and in many cases conversational and technical English. This may not be a complete list of the soft skills your test team needs for project success. Offshore teams will vary widely in their experience level and their cultural background, so the training needs will also vary widely. In my experience, I've seen teams ranging from one completely composed of repatriated engineers who had lived and worked in the US, to many teams of freshers, the Indian nickname for a worker on their first job out of university.

The need for increased management oversight of offshore teams is widely known to be the biggest pain point for domestic staff. Whether it is too many late-night phone calls, not getting the work done on time or simply a greater need for hands-on project management, you can tackle all these issues with effective training. Use training to set and discuss expectations, layout processes and procedures and most importantly open doors for greater communication and visibility. Training should support your goal of micro-communication, but not micro-management. Training should also be used to identify what the team knows and what they don't, which sets a roadmap for future training.

Unique Training Needs for Offshore Teams

Your offshore team may have been assembled for their technical skill alone. Just like your domestic team, they will need training in domain knowledge, testing/QA knowledge and methods and of course, your testing process (structure, expectations, communication and documentation). Those are the obvious subjects; there are several which are not as obvious but just as critical.

Trust-building is typically not a major training consideration for domestic teams. It is for offshore teams. Training gives you more confidence that work is getting executed the way you intended as well and gives the offshore team more confidence they are doing what you want! Training needs to setup channels for open and fluid communication.

Outsourced development has one reputation, outsourced testing another. In many countries testing is considered throw away work- only a vehicle to get the real development work. After one training session I conducted in India, the Engineering manager told me I never knew testing was a real job. I put my worst staff on testing projects. Your training will need to include topics on why you test and the value of testing. Also remember, developers learn how to develop code at university. There is no school teaching American-style software testing; the best you can usually hope for, without training, is requirements validation.

There is tribal knowledge among team members about every facet of the product and project from how and why rarely used features work, to well-known bugs, or where certain test files live on some server. Local testers learn from each other and other project team members through yelling over a cubical wall, conversations overheard or at team meetings, and coffee machine chats--in other words learning by osmosis. It took years of learning to build up this level of knowledge. You cannot rely on this method of knowledge transfer for your offshore team. For a while, training needs to be centered on in-class, instructor-led training backed up by computer-based training.

Domain knowledge has proved to be the critical element for outsourced project success. As an example, if you are making credit card processing software in China where McKinsey & Co. estimate that fewer than 1 percent of the country's population has a credit card (50% of which are inactive), how can you expect your test team to effectively test from a credit card user's perspective? Similarly, if you are developing stock trading software in Russia, even if one of your testers says they have knowledge of stock trading in Russia, will that be applicable to US users or SEC compliance? Maybe not, but it's better than nothing. Many companies today are looking to hire business graduates into technology groups who will have more customer focus. This may also help cut down on technical staff turnover but will increase your training in technical areas.

These are straightforward examples, the more complex your application and the more sophisticated your users, the greater your need to give significant training on your business domain and users to your new test team.

The type of testing that will be done by the offshore team directly impacts the training they will need. In most cases you have a higher level of programming skill in your offshore team than in the domestic team. It makes sense to first send test automation offshore and keep user-focused scenario development and business process testing in your domestic office where you have more knowledge of the domain and the user.

In Part 2 of this article series, Michael discusses the following training areas:.

• Process
• Product and Domain Knowledge
• Testing Techniques

In Part 3 of this article series, Michael discusses the following training areas:.

• English Training
• Cross-Cultural Differences and Working with the Domestic Team
• Training Your Domestic Staff

In the fourth and final part of this article series, Michael discusses:.

• Staff Retention and Train the Trainer
• Training Material and Training Sessions

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