Successful Test Management
At a time when information systems are becoming ever more complex and quality to market and time to market are critical for many companies, a structured test process is essential. Even more important is a structured test management process to keep testing under control. Nowadays a test manager must have extensive knowledge of and experience with project management, risk assessment, team building, and, process improvement.
Based on their long-term industry experience, Pinkster and her coauthors describe a holistic approach to test management that combines test methods, test management, risk assessment and stakeholder management into one integral process, giving test managers, test coordinators, IT project managers, and QA managers a competitive edge in environments where there are numerous unstructured requirements, tough testing schedules and limited resources.
Review By: Noreen Dertinger
10/13/2008"Successful Test Management: An Integral Approach" describes the activities of a test manager based on a test management model developed by LogicaCMG. The activities described include setting the conditions for a test project, test strategies, estimating, and planning. The target audience for this book includes test managers, test coordinators, and team leaders. The authors suggest less experienced members of the book’s audience read the book end to end while more experienced readers can refer to the areas that are of most interest.
The methods described in this book apply mainly to software development. In the opening chapter, the authors describe different types of testing, namely, unstructured testing, testing with design documents, requirements based testing, and risk based testing. The recommended approach described in this volume is risk- and requirements-based testing that focuses on the risks to the business, not just the risks to the software under development. The priorities are based on product risks. Tests that cover the highest product risk are given preferential treatment. Requirements are linked to the appropriate product risks and the test team creates tests accordingly. In this process, a thorough risk assessment must be carried out. The identification of risks should include the following stakeholders: clients, customers, product experts, the project team, the project leader, a marketing manager, and the developers.
The remaining chapters deal with how to carry out the project in terms of feasibility, managing the test project, risk analysis, estimating the boundaries of the project (time and money for the testing), planning, the testing organization (roles and people required to carry out the testing), time management, and reporting.
Supporting appendices supplement the material in the main book. These include a detailed summary of Prince2 (a project management method that can be applied to projects developed in the UK, which is already used extensively by the UK government as well as in the private sector and internationally) and test management, a risk checklist, a template for risk- and requirement-based testing, quality attributes according to ISO9126, a template for the test plan, the goal metric question applied to testing, a checklist of project risks, and various report templates.
The authors encourage readers to substitute their own test method into the test management methodologies outlined. This book offers valuable information to almost anyone in the testing organization. For example, this book explains how to estimate time and resource requirements. I was most interested in the section about estimating and did find a good, high-level overview of the topic in this book. The materials and approaches contained within will be of greatest interest to those working with the Logica methodologies. Since the authors have indicated that the method can be adapted to one’s own situation, it may also be of value to others.