Today I read a post by Mr. Mohan Bharadwaj on Testing Challenges. I really liked the post.
Every now and then I hear people saying that we don’t have enough time for testing or our estimates have gone wrong due to some resource issues, however we can resolve these things by doing risk analysis, we need to identify the areas where testing should be focused.
Since it’s rarely possible to test every possible aspect of an application, every possible combination of events, every dependency, or everything that could go wrong, risk analysis is appropriate to most software development projects.
This requires judgment skills, common sense, and experience. (If warranted, formal methods are also available.) Considerations can include:
- Which functionality is most important to the project’s intended purpose?
- Which functionality is most visible to the user?
- Which functionality has the largest safety impact?
- Which functionality has the largest financial impact on users?
- Which aspects of the application are most important to the customer?
- Which aspects of the application can be tested early in the development cycle?
- Which parts of the code are most complex, and thus most subject to errors?
- Which parts of the application were developed in rush or panic mode?
- Which aspects of similar/related previous projects caused problems?
- Which aspects of similar/related previous projects had large maintenance expenses?
- Which parts of the requirements and design are unclear or poorly thought out?
- What do the developers think are the highest-risk aspects of the application?
- What kinds of problems would cause the worst publicity?
- What kinds of problems would cause the most customer service complaints?
- What kinds of tests could easily cover multiple functionalities?
- Which tests will have the best high-risk-coverage to time-required ratio?
Not enough time for thorough testing?
This is a cry frequently heard as deadlines approach.
You can hear most of the managers screaming about this issue….
However there could be a number of answers:
1. The testers were not able to complete testing due to a new release being loaded.
2. The bug was not in an earlier release (reload that earlier release and see).
3. The bug could not be tested for earlier because some part of the release did not work and inhibited
the test’s ability to “see” the bug.
4. The bug was in some part of the system not originally planned for the release for which a test has only just been written.
5. The bug was found while running some other test.
6. The bug was in a part of a system which was not the focus of testing.
7. The bug would have been found eventually, but the tester hadn’t run the test (which would have found it) yet.
8. And yes, maybe if we’d been more thorough we’d have found that bug earlier.
It’s always good to keep in place a corrective action in place so that the impact of the issue can be minimized and the stake holders and the client/s do not lose faith on you and your team.
