Thursday, August 11, 2011

Managing stakeholders - Test Manager perspective

Test manager will be addressing on day-to-day basis questions like:
  • Why actual QA effort was more than planned?
  • Why are we exceeding from number QA cycles planned in the project plan?
  • Why do we need to do so much testing for few changes done to the code?
  • Why are we still doing unit level tests at system level tests?
  • What can we do to test cases attributes to qualify which helps us to decide on priority, during test execution cycle?
  • How many defects logged are not traced to test cases? What are we doing about this?
  • What risks were anticipated during test plan? How they were mitigated?

I feel these can be addressed better with focus on following:
  • Good test case architecture where all levels of test cases fit and with right set of attributes defined helps test case selection on need basis
  • Quality gates or levels of testing better defined with defect types to be uncovered as focus than use same old Unit, Integration and System testing as levels of tests
  • Introduce escape tracking at each quality gate
  • Define criteria to move testing from one level to another level and improve the definition continuously
  • Introduce better tracking report to look at progress aspects, cleanliness aspects, test coverage aspects
  • User lessons learnt and fix the gaps for future cycles of testing
  • Use defect centered activity breakdown during planning phase


I like to hear any comments or different views from the community



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