Practical lessons learned in the coordination of a multi-site SQA team

Performing technical activities across geographic and time zone boundaries presents unique challenges to both management and practitioners in today's business environment. The problems of separated groups are becoming a common challenge due to business needs and the multiple land even multi-national) locations of modern companies. These issues apply to any discipline in which close coordination is required between members of a group. Although this paper discusses the challenges faced in forming and managing a Software Quality Assurance (SQA) group, the principles described here apply to many other multi-site activities. While it may be intuitive that geographical separation leads to problems in maintaining consistency between groups, the actual problems are not easy to solve. The major problem faced by multi-site operations is difficulty in communication between team members. The barriers to communication that cause the problem equally limit the solution, and this challenge is equally applicable for SQA. Since the audit activity is paced by the progress of the development group, the SQA team is constantly in a reactionary mode, and inter-group coordination and communication fall ever lower on the priority list. This paper addresses some of the problems associated with startup and management of a multi-site group. Although our experience was with a SQA group, we feel the principles involved apply to any multi-site organization. We also describe the barriers to communication, and a number of remedies we found to be useful.