Hello Dee -
The argument for 24 hour testing is a bit painting a house, you can get more done. "better yet", the argument goes, "development ends the day and testing picks up."
It sounds great.
In reality, having the two groups working separately covers over some problems. for example, the batch size here, the length of time coding, is eight hours. I'd rather tighten that, get some back and forth going. Also, if you need testing because there are problems with the code, it is possible, even likely, that the offshore or elsewhere or other-time testing group gets blocked - and there is no one there to un-block them.
In an extreme example, login is broken, so the "testers" start at 6:00PM local and immediately get blocked. The next day, the programmers fix login, but the user does not have the right permission to do the new feature, or the new feature is not visibile after login, or there is a database problem, or or or - and nothing gets done overnight, even though the company pays for "work" all night. If defects are high and fixing is slow, 24 hour testing can actually be a expensive and wasteful process.
Alternatively, 24 hour a day montioring of production - that can be very valuable.
