Aligning Testing with Quality Risks
Rex Black · 2016
This chapter introduces a powerful technique, called technique quality risk analysis, for targeting software test efforts. Sales, marketing, and project sponsor documents should give hints about what is most important. All the risks to system quality add up to the possibility that the users, customers, and other stakeholders will be dissatisfied. The chapter suggests mitigating the risk by testing in such a way that one experiences the quality of the system through the eyes of the users, customers, and stakeholders before they receive the system. Trying to explore many nonfunctional quality risks like security, performance, and reliability in less complex settings often does not work. The chosen configurations will be better at finding bugs if they live at the upper and lower boundaries of supported memory, CPU, disk space, and other parameters. The sales, marketing, and business analysts know the target users and customers. The technical support or help desk staff know the current users and customers. Project and senior management know the overall direction of the business and the system. Users groups, test newsgroups, peers, and publications have anecdotes and some data. The team then tries to anticipate the effects of each failure on the user, the customer, other stakeholders, or even society. Prioritization occurs based on an assessment of the severity, priority, and likelihood of each effect.