"A lot of things fly when the skies are blue." - How much testing is enough? How does testing go agile and keep up with the pace of change? How do we know when we have enough quality to release? These questions become more important as software delivery teams work agile, faster to market and to a higher standard. This books contains practical strategies and methods for the QA professional, which will help you examine risk, drive your approach from it, and adjust it when conditions change.
We will talk about some of the mechanics of risk-driven testing, but also about the shift in thinking and the testing stance it engenders. Once you shift left, and start thinking risk-based, your testing mind will change. You will get used to asking question like: How is this going to break? What is the impact if this fails? How much testing does this really need? How do I maximize the effect of testing?
With this approach, there is no such thing as not enough time (or money or information) for testing. You can design effective QA under any constraints, and throw it back to see if it meets the appetite for risk (“here’s what I can do with x. Do you want that?”); and if not, you can easily scale up or down.
To help you get there, this primer will walk you chapter by chapter through the method of risk-driven testing. We will first shed some light on the principles of risk-driven testing, and on the general method for decision making (Chapter 1). From there, we will discuss strategizing, which is the single most valuable thing to do in any project (Chapter 2). With that in place, we will take a deep dive into project work, first for Agile (Chapter 3), where we will dive into planning an iteration, managing change, and monitoring releasability. Then we will look at risk-driven testing in a more traditional development cycle, where we will look at planning a risk-driven test sequence, as well as managing risk in test design, and managing defect risk.
While this is not exhaustive (it cannot be in a book this size), it nevertheless highlights the key techniques you will need to apply the risk-driven approach in your job, and give you the tools to be at ease with the growing challenge and the pressure that’s always out there.
We will talk about some of the mechanics of risk-driven testing, but also about the shift in thinking and the testing stance it engenders. Once you shift left, and start thinking risk-based, your testing mind will change. You will get used to asking question like: How is this going to break? What is the impact if this fails? How much testing does this really need? How do I maximize the effect of testing?
With this approach, there is no such thing as not enough time (or money or information) for testing. You can design effective QA under any constraints, and throw it back to see if it meets the appetite for risk (“here’s what I can do with x. Do you want that?”); and if not, you can easily scale up or down.
To help you get there, this primer will walk you chapter by chapter through the method of risk-driven testing. We will first shed some light on the principles of risk-driven testing, and on the general method for decision making (Chapter 1). From there, we will discuss strategizing, which is the single most valuable thing to do in any project (Chapter 2). With that in place, we will take a deep dive into project work, first for Agile (Chapter 3), where we will dive into planning an iteration, managing change, and monitoring releasability. Then we will look at risk-driven testing in a more traditional development cycle, where we will look at planning a risk-driven test sequence, as well as managing risk in test design, and managing defect risk.
While this is not exhaustive (it cannot be in a book this size), it nevertheless highlights the key techniques you will need to apply the risk-driven approach in your job, and give you the tools to be at ease with the growing challenge and the pressure that’s always out there.
