Implementation of Risk Based Testing to deliver critical project
Writing by Laura Casci on Sunday, 8 of March, 2009 at 1:18 pm
The client, an international financial service organization, wanted to upgrade its existing mortgage application with new features, including the integration of a third party insurance system. This would ensure that the mortgages would be intrinsically linked to relevant insurance products, allowing the client to offer its customers a onestop-shop. There was a real competitive advantage for the client to do this; hence it became a strategic initiative with senior business sponsorship.
The project itself was made of three distinct components; integration of a new 3rd party insurance application, implementation of a maintenance release and a complete Siebel upgrade. Each of these would provide a challenge individually, and it soon became clear that the integrated technical solution was not robust. AppLabs was engaged to help the client understand what was causing the issues and how the client should approach mitigating the business risk that was being exposed.
Initially, AppLabs completed a smoke test against the integrated applications. This highlighted that an upgrade to the latest Siebel version of the application was failing to work with the current configuration of LDAP. To overcome the repercussion, AppLabs recommended the client to implement a Risk Based Testing approach. This will mitigate the risk of not being able to test all planned items in scope. AppLabs has a comprehensive and defined method of implementing Risk Based Testing, so changing policy to meet the business challenge was relatively seamless.
By the time the test environment was configured and ready for test execution (without the Siebel upgrade), all the preparatory work for implementing the Risk Based Testing had been completed. The profiling of tests was carried out in such a way that the planned 1000 test cases, was reduced by 20% to 800 test cases–all of which were executed within the timeframe to meet the original implementation date.
The improvement in the testing processes and move to Risk Based Testing resulted in true efficiencies. The approach resulted in a reduction of 360 man-days to the project–equating to a saving of £144,000–representing 11% of the project’s testing budget, and above all hitting the deadline date.
Category: Project Examples, Software Testing, Test Process Improvement
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