Quick assessment of test process maturity

If you believe that increasing effectiveness of test process in the organization impacts positively on top and bottom line of your business, you must find ways and means to know how is your test process behaving at present? and is there a systematic way to improve the test process?

Here I am sharing some symptoms to quickly assess the test process maturity and if you see consensus among decision makers at your organization to focus on process improvement, I recommend you to look at TMMi framework. The steps involved according to me are:

1. Understand TMMi framework
2. Assess where the current process maturity is
3. Identify gaps to reach a specific level of test process maturity
4. Find appropriate way to fix those gaps effectively

An improved process along with a good test methodology like HBT (coming from STAG) you will see accelerated path to achieve your goal.

http://www.slideshare.net/stagsoft/an-introduction-to-hypothesis-based-testing

http://www.slideshare.net/stagsoft/hbt-a-revolutionary-approach-to-testing-software

http://slidesha.re/MCN-Quick-TP-Assess

Solving business problem with Test Process Improvement

What kind of problem if you have should take a look at improving existing test process?

I suggest you look at any of these problem symptom given below, if 50% 0f the core management team feels "yes" to two or more potential problems below, then I strongly recommend to take Test Process improvement initiative as management sponsored project.

1. Releases are delayed significantly due to quality issues
2. Test cases we have seems to be not adequate resulting in bad releases
3. Major defects are encountered only during system testing resulting in more QA cycles than planned
4. Though organization encourage multi-leveled test focus but planning process and competency of team not helping to achieve this effectively
5. Product is evolving more regression cycles than planned and unable to cope up with commitment to major releases
6. Risks are not analyzed correctly after test results are out resulting in wrong decisions
7. Product seems to be stable, more customization and releases happening resulting in lot of effort going into test execution phase
8. All aspects of quality not assessed like Load, Stress, Performance, and Scalability (LSPS) thereby Marketing/Sales unable to position product correctly in the market place
9. UAT by customer not happening as per plan resulting in delayed revenue realization against plan
10. Unable to get right set of people for projects when needed

I also recommend to baseline the above problem quantitatively like in what percentage of projects these problem exists and see the improvement with same measurement after you have modified the processes and used by team for 3-6 months.

Test Process Improvement

How to decide whether we need to invest our time and effort on improving our test process? How much to invest? What ROI (Return on investment) we can anticipate? Is there a systematic way to improve test process maturity? Where do we stand as on today?

Let me take first question and see whether I can answer all other questions

How to decide whether test process improvement required?

First main factor is degree of customer satisfaction. Each organization will have their own way to measure this. Just for understanding purpose, let us assume we measure this in a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being very happy customer). If we have randomly distributed number of customers in all these five levels may be worth looking at what does it take to achieve 3 and more. Many times answer will be look at process, people, technology and tools used to do the required activities. This is where I feel process improvement focus will help because process can be improved only when you look at all the other three factors above.

First thing in process improvement is to set a goal (where do you want to reach) and assess where do we stand as on today. I recommend to use TMMi framework to assess what you have as practice and how it meets stated practice for all maturity levels. This framework will guide you to set goals and improve the process step by step.

In all processes we do know that people play major role. Technology and tools may help in consistency and speed. How to make sure all in the organization irrespective of their previous experience follow standard discipline for doing specific jobs in a test life cycle activities so that we ensure consistency in the output at each stage of conversion of input to output. This is the place where I encourage people to look test methodology HBT coming from STAG.

Yes, an effective test process powered by HBT ( http://www.slideshare.net/stagsoft/an-introduction-to-hypothesis-based-testing ) had shown significant cost reduction from our experience. HBT helps to accelerate process improvement initiative in the organization. http://www.stagsoftware.com/blog/?p=324

Testing team organization

Introduction

Many organizations are experimenting with different operational models to sustain a strong testing team with various business challenges they are facing. I am sharing my observations made in entire journey as software professional. Each model attempted had its own issues and challenges. It is important that organization attempting any of this model to aware of these potential issues and take necessary steps to counter them.

http://www.slideshare.net/mcnagaraj/testing-team-7816329

Effective test process and long sustenance of test engineers were observed more in the case of “Independent testing team under Test Manager” model. Test engineers started seeing career path for their growths. Test process improvement initiatives focused at organization level than project level.