TL;DR

Your project is at the stage when you have dedicated in-house testing team. Here are possible problems that you may ecounter with in-house testing team. This post is aligned with Black Box Software Testing Foundations course (BBST) created by Rebecca Fiedler, Cem Kaner and James Bach.

In-House Test Missions

We already wrote what is software tester mission. It is important to remember that one testing project has one or two testing missions. Here is the list of typical missions:

• bug hunting
• quality advocacy
• development support
• release management
• support cost reduction

The problems

As with any activity, you could face following problems with in house testing team.

Ineffectiveness of testers. Example of ineffectiveness is when testers are hunting for bugs but many important bugs are “slipping” through their fingers. Manager has to figure out real reasons of ineffectiveness.

Attention to process instead of quality. Example is that every issue has to be reported in bug tracker. But those bug reports does not have attributes of good bug reports.

Lack of product/service knowledge. Very common in complex domains. Example of complex domain is telecom industry and base station code that handles phone handover to neighboring cell stations.

Lack of collaboration. Have you created a competitive environment? Do you have one tester with all domain knowledge? Then you have an lack of collaboration.

The Solution

Here is typical solution of management that have above problems with in-house testing team, outsourcing. This also has its pros and cons.