Why Security and Outsourcing Are Key Trends in Testing and Performance (Continued)

Pros and Cons of Outsourcing T&P
If you're going to hire an offshore service to handle all or part of your T&P work, keep in mind that cultural differences can play a big part on how well the work will get done.

"I'm finding that 'offshoring' some of my line work helps my overall bottom line and also frees my U.S. engineers to do more design and architecting, which is what they do best," said Matt Liotta, founder and CEO of Montara Software in Atlanta, Georgia. "The culture of the offshore shop plays importantly in this picture. For example, when I send exact specifications on a project to my shop in India, I find that their developers were excellent at following my exact orders. This works perfectly for me … I don't need to have them making other suggestions or whatever. This is a generalization, but I find it to be true; they follow orders well, and their culture literally shows up in my software."

Kolawa agreed. "Subcontractors in China and India are a viable alternative for many U.S. companies. Whereas a U.S. developer may deviate a bit from the spec but will often stumble onto a new idea, the Indian or Chinese developer basically will ... do it exactly how it's spelled out," he said. "But this is why so much innovation comes out of the U.S."

Grid Computing Brings New Challenges
Testing and optimizing applications for a slew of grid network computers presents new problems; in fact, this topic is worth a full story by itself.

Grid computing is the latest marketing-speak trend in enterprise IT systems. Ostensibly, the advantage is that companies can save money immediately by using existing computers together with inexpensive newer computers in a fail-safe network powered by a high-end central database and application servers. This opposes conventional thinking that companies have to continually purchase more—and more powerful—computers and software every few years, laying to waste previous versions of expensive software and hardware.

In order for a grid test to be close to relevant, testers must try to emulate something that's very hard to do: What happens to an app when it's running on dozens, if not hundreds, of different servers and workstations across a vast network? Those kinds of challenges speak for themselves.

"First of all, you've got to test apps on a (simulated) network that all are roughly the same size and scale that you're actually putting into production," McKendrick said. "Then, you have to test for many more use cases, which can be costly and time-consuming. Not a simple or easy thing to do at all."

Nobody said software development was going to be easy.

About the Author
Chris Preimesberger is an IT writer/researcher based in the San Francisco Bay Area.