Organizations look at two ways to reduce repetitive testing costs-automation and offshoring. Although either can work, combining these two approaches has the promise of even more savings to organizations by freeing up their employees for more creative testing. Because both automation and offshoring are complex operations in and of themselves, combining them adds more risks and challenges that can lead to disappointment and a "double backlash" instead of a "double benefit" if not implemented with proven approaches. Test automation pioneer Hans Buwalda shares his personal "adventures" with offshoring and outsourcing automated testing. Organized along major challenges he's faced-methodology, automation technology, cultural differences, long distances, and hard to deal with time differences-Hans presents a set of failure patterns that are common in offshoring and offers practical suggestions for how to overcome them.

Leslie Sachs predicts 2012 as the year when companies will rediscover the importance of holding onto and developing their human resources like never before. Additionally, the year will challenge CM experts as they try to manage effectively when cloud providers often control significant resources.

In large outsourced projects, the contractual aspects of testing are often poorly defined even though testing may be half the overall project cost. Why is this? Test activities may be split between the development organization, customer, and test outsourcing partners. When things go wrong, the test process and the contractual obligations relating to testing will come under close scrutiny. Unfortunately, many projects get their contracts wrong with regard to testing. In Paul Gerrard's experience, few organizations’ contract and legal experts know how to structure a contractual testing schedule that is fair, unambiguous, explicit, and comprehensive. As testers, we may need to help our own “experts.” Paul describes the critical aspects of a contract that must be included to ensure supplier obligations for testing are documented and will be met.

Efficiency and effectiveness are the cornerstones of successful quality assurance and test automation effort. Jeff Beange describes how RBC Financial Group successfully implemented a quality assurance and automation outsourcing engagement, using a blended onshore/offshore approach. He describes the details of the engagement model and outlines the risks they encountered. Jeff describes their mitigation strategy, governance structure, and the metrics used to evaluate their implementation. Learn a communication strategy and automation framework you can use to implement automation using an outsourcing partnership. Find out what setup is required before any outsourcing model can be successful: detailed requirements, a complete set of test data, and a test lab that is accessible to all. Jeff describes the common pitfalls of offshore engagements and the three categories of outsourcing problems-people, process, and governance.