Test Leads and Test Managers very rarely make the decision to offshore. It is typically not a choice, but rather a mandate from company executives who look to offshoring for significant cost reduction. Among US leads and managers responsible for offshore teams, management and oversight of the offshore teams is now cited as their largest source of job stress.
Divide and conquer was a strategy successfully employed by ancient Persian kings against their Greek enemies. It is a strategy that can still be used successfully today. Fundamentally, by dividing something into smaller more manageable pieces (in the case of the ancient Persians, they divided the Greek city states), it becomes much more manageable.
Test automation provides great benefits to the software testing process and improves the quality of the results. It improves reliability while minimizing variability in the results, speeds up the process, increases test coverage, and ultimately can provide greater confidence in the quality of the software being tested. However, automation is not a silver bullet. It also brings some problems. The solution for test automation is to first define the test methodology, then choose the right enabling technology to help you implement the methodology. The chosen methodology should provide measurable improvements to the following four success drivers:
