Reducing Cost and Duration of the Test Phase
Writing by admin on Thursday, 15 of July, 2010 at 5:28 am
Reducing cost and duration of a test phase is of utmost importance to stakeholders. Stakeholders and project managers can sometimes be surprised by how much a test phase can cost. Take for instance, if substandard software is delivered to the test team, the cost can increase due to defect raising, fixing, and retesting, resulting in either an extended release date or high costs for staff overtime. On top of this, late running development, poor estimations or critical defects can further delay the release date.
Additional time spent on the planning phase with substantial involvement of the core team can pay rich dividends as the project unfolds. It is of utmost importance to include a test manager in the process from the beginning, who could also act as a reviewer of the plan. Assumptions, constraints, items in or out of scope, entry or exit criteria can be identified and agreed upfront and changes can be managed effectively as the project progresses.
Estimates should be prepared based on historic data and with reference to business analysts and developers. If the required testing is expected to exceed the planned date, then a risk based or prioritized approach can be adopted early on, reducing the demand for extra test resources by not ending up in the test phase. It is also necessary to highlight in the test execution, run rates and expected defect rates per day or week and ensure that there are enough fixed resources allocated to turn around the expected defects in a timely manner.
Successful software delivery requires development and testing teams to be independent yet collaborative and testers may be included in requirement reviews, requirement changes and module demos, in a move to add value as well as to ensure that they are creating the right test scripts. It is important for the development team to be aware of the automated tools that testers intend to use, as there unawareness could end up in constantly changing object properties, leading to large amount of script maintenance and troubleshooting for automated testers.
It is also vital to ensure that scripts are produced in a prioritized order and time could be set aside for the test environment to be clean and ready prior to the delivery of software. In addition, testing some modules early, supplementing existing test resources with offshore resources, including test risks with the overall project risks, and building up test creation and test execution schedules can reduce cost and duration of the test phase.
Testing vendors like AppLabs assist businesses by successfully applying all of the above-mentioned methods and many more. Such process improvements can yield major cost savings and provide higher quality software on targeted release dates.
Category: Software Testing, Test Plan
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