"We talk about outsourced development when an organisation hires or delegates (totally or partially) the building and/or maintenance process of software to third party companies."

The interface between the outsourcer and the owner normally includes:

• Requirements definition;
• Scope proposal (functional, deliverable etc.);
• A set of criteria to measure the quality of the delivered software;
• Validation of deliverables by the owner, following the set of criteria previously agreed and based on the requirements especification;
• Correction of the non-compliances by the outsourcer detected by the owner in the validation phase;
• Analyse unexpected events involved in the building and maintenance of a software system and the application of counter-measures that may facilitate its resolution.

Outsourcer and owner are different entities. This fact introduces some issues that impact directly on the quality of the software finally delivered:

• There is no explicit quality model or best case scenario, it is too undefined;
• The internal quality has not been taken into account as much as the functional requirements;
• There is no continuous access to deliverables, meaning from a customer’s perspective, a feeling of “black box” that has been delivered which quality level is very hard to know without doing an audit in earlier phases.

The effects of the points mentioned above end up in:

• Larger number of issues and maintenance and support efforts;
• Although well conceived from a functional point of view a poor internal quality and performance could make the new application too far away from business reality;
• Serious security issues that finally have to be solved with external tools;
• Notable increase in maintenance costs.

Quality contol on the owner’s side

This is where Optimyth checKing QA and our assessment team can support your organisation to achieve your quality goals of every single software system.

checKing QA is the perfect tool to analyse the software quality allowing both, the monitoring of the software development processes and its results and the quality of the software before it goes to production. We add transparency to the development process by catching, integrating and presenting metrics extracted from different tools and external systems.