Thursday, May 21, 2015

How to use Risk based Testing to Save Cost without Compromising Quality?

Risk Based Testing

The Primary job of testing is to find defects in test environments and make sure the defects are not explored in production. To do this several processes are followed and many phases of testing are crossed.
Most of the testing follows phases including Unit testing, System Testing, System integration testing, User Acceptance Testing and Performance testing phases, based on the special requirement other testing like security testing, compatibility testing, cross browser testing, Conversion testing, Containment testing, Localisation testing and few others still to name are performed . Though we develop the application or system once, we take it to several rounds of testing and that is how the testing budget slowly increased to 35% of the total spending of IT projects.

How can we cut down the cost ?

All the testing are performed for the approved requirements, especially function testing drives testing various permutations and data combinations. All the testing are done to confirm the business expectations and confidence of the business to take the product live. In most of the cases the priority of the Business is not cascading to all the subsequent teams. Hence to solve all these problems, the simplest solution is to prioritize the Business requirements based on the Risk. Testing the High risk functions first have two advantages

1.If the major function's defects were unleashed first, it can be fixed early. Early fix may reduce the risk of delay and give planned time of testing for all the test phases

2.  If the high risk function does not perform as expected, it have higher chances of having related defects in connected requirements or functions.

How to categories the risk ?

Requirements should be classified into various levels or buckets of risk .
The Risk type can be arrived by the combination of

Impact of Failure X Probability of risk 

Impact of Failure can be categorized into various levels like L-Low, M-Medium and H-High
Probability of failure can be categorized into various levels like 1-Least, 2- Medium, 3- Most

If a requirement have Medium impact of failure to business in production and  Most probably it may fail, then the category should be M3

All the requirement should be categorized in such a way that testing should start from H3 first and priority goes down till L1


Advantages 

  • Exhaustive testing can be eliminated
  • Limited testing but necessary testing is performed
  • High Risk requirements are testing first assures stake holder confidence about the project progress
  • Time to market is reduced
  • Cost due to rework and retesting due to late identification of defects can be eliminated
  • Last but not least, a method to do quality testing



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