Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) for Software Quality Assurance

I talked to someone who owned a software company for outsourcing in Asia. The idea was, as always, to provide software developers with lower hourly rates for customer’s software projects. The specialty was a management of Europeans who drove a tight, Scrum based project and company management.

The question about quality assurance arose from my site. All I got as answer was, that the Software is developed with Scrum, with 2 week sprints, the source code and the results are shared on daily basis with the customer and that daily stand up meetings are held, sprint demos are organized together with the customer and some tools were in place for project monitoring. But, there was nothing told about source code quality, testing or code reviews. Assuming I was a customer who outsources its development projects to a company like, I wonder what source code and quality I get. The source code produced with outsourcing, is the property of the customer who pays for that. The customer wants high quality, but what is the interest of the development team in Asia about the quality of the source and the test coverage? I have no concise answer for that.

Scrum, as I understand it, is mainly a kind of project management. Scrum is not for quality management per se, but for satisfying stakeholders. Quality is not build into software, but into the process in form of retrospectives, demos and daily stand ups. Scrum assures deliveries in time and a transparent software development.

If you look into Extreme Programming (XP), that is quite different. Except of the terms, the Scrum methodology is also built into XP, but there is much more. XP also has Quality Assurance potential build in, in form of Pair-Programming, Test-Driven-Development (TDD), dedicated testers and other elements. Would it not be more suitable for companies providing outsourcing services?

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