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Training for Offshore Testing Teams
(Part 4 of 4)
Michael Hackett, VP of Business Operations, LogiGear Corporation
In Part 1 of this article series, Michael discussed the unique training needs for offshore software testing/QA teams. In Part 2 he discussed the training areas of process, product and domain knowledge, and testing techniques. In Part 3 he discussed the training areas of English training, cross-cultural differences and working with the domestic team, and training your domestic staff.
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 Dick 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.
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