Better Software - January 2009 - (Page 27) • Allocate test effort intelligently within constraints. Theoretically, testing teams would like to test every aspect of their software exhaustively. This is simply not possible. Risk-based testing enabled the team to selectively eliminate testing tasks that would not negatively affect customers or the project, so the team could focus its efforts on issues of real importance. • Find the scary stuff first. Riskbased testing delivered a lot of value in terms of issue discovery. It enabled the team to pinpoint potentially serious problems that required remediation early in testing. This gave developers plenty of time to make changes without adversely affecting the overall project timeline. • Respond flexibly to reductions in available test time and resources. As often happens in the real world, the team lost a person during the project. Having prioritized risks made it easier to intelligently reassign tasks to others. It also made it easier to determine which tasks to eliminate in order to meet the target delivery date. • Optimize quality. Ultimately, the entire point of testing is to deliver products of superior quality to customers. With risk-based testing, we ensured that the product we delivered to our customers had been thoroughly tested for issues that might significantly affect their satisfaction. We also learned several important lessons about risk-based testing and risk analysis. One was to include business users—and, in the future, potentially even customers—in the risk analysis process. Technical staff tend to think about risk impact primarily in technical terms, such as outages or functional annoyances. But people from the business side were able to offer better insight into what kinds of issues would be most problematic for them in terms of personal productivity or business process failures. This insight is invaluable for accurately assigning risk priority numbers to testing tasks. As software developers are called upon to deliver increasingly sophisticated and complex products within tighter and tighter resource constraints, prioritization of testing tasks will become increasingly important both for achieving product quality and for meeting project deadlines. Risk-based testing planning is therefore an essential discipline—one that testing teams should adopt as soon as they can. {end} The authors would like to thank the members of the SYSVIEW team who participated in the risk analysis process for their time and diligence, especially Bob Carpenter, product line manager; Phyllis Casella, engineering project manager; Jim Cray, director software engineering; Jim Gubala, quality assurance engineer; David Jones, manager sustaining engineering; Jim Kaste, manager quality assurance; Jim Williams, principal product manager; Rob Steiskal, sr. product marketing manager. www.StickyMinds.com JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009 BETTER SOFTWARE 27 http://www.ranorex.com http://www.ranorex.com http://www.StickyMinds.com
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