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INDUSTRY WATCH:
Russian School Passes Test
By David Rubinstein
 August 1, 2004 —News item: The first 15 students have graduated from the American Software Quality Assurance School in Moscow.
The graduates, presumably, will go to work for Russia-based technology companies, or contract themselves out to firms looking to get QA work done on the cheap—or at all.
In the United States, QA and software testing is not seen as a career path, according to the excellent article written by Edward J. Correia in this newspaper (“Testing 101: AWOL on the College Campus,” April 15, page 1). In that article, the point was made that only a handful of American colleges and universities include software testing in their computer science curricula. Part of the reason was revealed in a telling quote from Azer Bestavros, chairman of Boston University’s computer science department: “We do not consider software testing to be a career. Testing positions are the least desired job of undergraduates.”
The Moscow school was opened in February of this year by Silicon Valley-based XIM Inc., a systems integration and consulting firm with some founders of Russian descent. The company has around 150 employees, with a little more than 50 in the U.S. and the rest in Russia. So the idea of creating a talent pool overseas to handle testing was important to XIM, and other companies will benefit as well, since not all the school graduates will go to work for XIM.
“We’re different from companies that hire contractors to complete projects offshore,” said Eugene Poznikov, vice president of professional services for XIM. “These all are our own employees.”
Poznikov said XIM does not position itself as a pure offshore company. “We’re U.S.-based,” he said. “When companies don’t want to go offshore, we do all the work here.” He went on to say that 99 percent of the company’s clients at first are cautious about the concept of offshoring, wondering what it will do to their U.S. workforce in terms of morale. After gaining a little experience, though, most companies just say that as long as the project is completed by a certain deadline and under a certain budget, they don’t care how—or where—the work gets done, he said.
Part of the reason American colleges don’t see testing as a career path, Poznikov opined, is that for a long time, testing—especially the black-box kind—was essentially a menial task. Developers would create programs, which then would get banged on by a number of testers who would look for errors and flaws in the program.
Today, he said, the move is toward building quality into the application during the development phase, so the role of the developer—as well as of the tester—is shifting. Now it’s important for anyone doing testing to understand the development process, and to better communicate with and understand the developer.
“[Testing] might not be called a career path, but go into any development shop and ask their process, and any knowledgeable project lead will tell you 20 to 25 percent of the work is testing and refactoring on a daily basis.”
Overseas, Poznikov said, the knowledge bases of programmers is fine, but they have to be taught how testing plays into the development process. “We need to bring it up to how it’s done in this country, so they can speak the same language as developers and testers here, both the technical language and the process language,” he said.
XIM has tailored the Moscow school’s curriculum to students from the Moscow State Institute of Radio Engineering, Electronics and Automation and includes such topics as the Rational Unified Process, methodology, Web site and application testing, and test automation. XIM employees and other contractors teach the course work.
I’m sure this news will spark another round of letter-writing from readers complaining about how more jobs now are likely to move overseas, throwing yet more Americans out of work.
But if these are jobs that Americans don’t want, that they don’t see as a “career path,” then they can’t begrudge others for filling those spots. High technology isn’t the first field to lose jobs to non-Americans, and it won’t be the last.
Look at the landscape in this country—or, more accurately, look at landscaping in this country. When I was growing up, kids walked around the neighborhood with mowers, edgers and weeders, and would do a yard for $10 or $12. Today, you don’t see any kids at all. What you see is foreigners—primarily from Latin America, many of whom are in the U.S. illegally—working for landscapers and tree removal services. Yet Americans don’t complain loudly about this loss of jobs because they consider the work too menial, and too low-paying, to do themselves.
American colleges and universities need to add testing to their curricula—not as something that’s done after an application is written, but as an integral, integrated part of the development life cycle. This would create a level of testers above the black-box folks, and create a career path graduates would be encouraged to follow.
David Rubinstein is editor of SD Times.
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