This is the fourth in a four part series that summarizes the key points in Minimize IT Outsourcing Risk with Collaborative Quality. You can click on the title to get the complete white paper. In the previous post in this series we looked at how to handle changing components and dependencies and achieve validation on an ongoing basis, as well as how to enable parallel development and testing without constraints.
Too often, companies allow the success of their outsource efforts to hinge on the performance of the services partner alone. In this post, we summarize best practices and responsibilities for the outsourcing consumer, after all, successful collaboration must be a two-way street.
Reward Outsource Partners for Delivery Success... Not Just Delivering. – Do not prematurely sign off on delivered code assets just to meet a deadline, before adequate testing to ensure requirements are met.
- Trust, But Verify... Continuously - Distributed teams need to document component dependencies and test them as part of their deliverable. The consumer then needs to add tests at a business process level to ensure that expected behaviors are verified in the context of the consuming workflow.
- Enable Greater Productivity by Removing Constraints - Service Virtualization can enable multiple teams to work freely in parallel, rather than at odds due to the constraint of having access to live or incomplete systems. For instance the VSE in LISA Virtualize your partners with a way to decouple themselves from dependencies, by modeling test resources as Virtual Services that behave just like the rest of the application for testing and development purposes.
In summary, a partnership between outsource consumers and outsource providers based on shared objectives for collaborative quality is the best approach to maximize the benefits of IT outsourcing. Success depends upon a combination of people, processes and enabling technology to foster greater productivity, agility and quality across distributed teams. Key capabilities for this success include a collaborative framework for testing functional requirements, continuous test and validation of delivered components within the context of larger systems, and virtualization of constrained resources for greater productivity and improved time-to-market for distributed teams.
This ends our brief series on Outsourcing with Collaborative Quality - however we will continue to post on this important topic as we work with an ecosystem of customers and partners with the shared goal of delivering successful software releases on time and under budget. Your comments and ideas for future topics welcomed.
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