Software testing risks and mitigation examples




















Make it a point that any risk management plan covers both user and partner expectations when it comes to better performance. B enchmarks and threshold evaluation should be considered in the entire project to ensure that the software project is being conducted in the right direction. Organizational issues can have detrimental impacts on project completion. Effective staffing in volves selecting team members with the right skill sets that are a perfect match for the project.

Risk m anagement p lan. Upon identification of the potential risks based on their types, the project manager should draft a risk mitigation plan. As part of a comprehensive strategy , the risk management plan cites the resolution for every potential risk encountered. Regular monitoring and mitigation. To make it more effective, each software risk monitoring plan should be the focus of most software project tasks.

T his means checking the project progress during scheduled meetings and critical activities. Monitoring activities involve the following. Publi cation of project reports , includ ing the status of risk management issues. Revis ion of risk plans based on any major revisions in proj ect schedule s.

Ongoing review and prioritization of risks encountered, minimizing those with the lowest probability. Evaluate possible new risks after modifications to the project timeline or scope of work. As the risk happens, the best mitigation resoluti on must be undertaken based on the risk management plan.

Concerning mitigating options, these include the details below. Recognize how the risk impact s the project. Consider accept ing the risk without any project revision. Approving the p roject management plan is required. Modify the project scope, timeline or issue to reduce the risk effects. Test process problems often occur when testing and engineering processes are poorly integrated. Organizations sometimes take a "one-size-fits-all" approach taken to testing, regardless of the specific needs of the project.

Testing may not be adequately prioritized so that functional testing , black-box system testing , or white-box unit and integration testing may be overemphasized. Testing of components, subsystems, or the system may begin before they are sufficiently mature for testing.

Other problems include inadequate test evaluations and inadequate test maintenance. Test tools and environments problems include an over-reliance on manual testing or COTS testing tools. Often, there are an insufficient number of test environments. Some of the test environments may also have poor quality excessive defects or insufficient fidelity to the actual system being tested.

Moreover, the system and software under test may behave differently during testing than during operation. Other common problems are that tests were not delivered or the test software, test data, and test environments were not under sufficient configuration control. Test communication problems primarily involve inadequate test documentation. These types of problems often occur when test documents are not maintained or inadequate communication concerning testing is taking place.

Requirements-related testing problems are related to the requirements that should be driving testing. Often, the requirements are ambiguous, missing, incomplete, incorrect, or unstable. Lower-level requirements may be improperly derived from their higher-level sources.

Likewise, verification methods may be unspecified and the tracing between requirements and tests may be lacking. Exacerbating these problems is the fact that too often research focuses on the defects identified through testing, but does not address problems that exist in an organization's planned testing process or its implementation of that process. Not surprisingly, a survey found that 58 percent of respondents blamed the testing process and infrastructure for their most recently identified major software defects.

Addressing General Testing Problems There are clearly many problems with the way software and software-reliant systems are tested, as discussed above. Moreover, these general testing problems are not getting significantly better, despite greater attention to test-driven development and continuous integration in the commercial software industry, which only address a few of the identified testing problems. In the case of a company building software for an external customer, it will correlate with profitability.

In the case of an enterprise building software for internal use, it can determine whether the software will actually improve productivity within the company. How do you improve user engagement? You might be surprised how simple the answer is - listen to your users.

Some possible mitigation strategies for this risk include:. The chance of poor end-user engagement is far more likely for projects following a waterfall methodology. This is because these types of projects are unable to adapt to end-user feedback during development.

The nature of waterfall development requires no scope variations. Though we have talked about managing stakeholder expectations as a mitigation strategy, the uptake of this strategy can in itself become a project risk. So what is a stakeholder in software development? Stakeholders are any person or group who can either impact, or will be impacted by an outcome of the software project.

These stakeholders can range from business owners, to the development team, or even investors in the project. It is this close relationship to the project outcome that make managing the expectations of each of these stakeholders a challenge. So how do you set expectations with stakeholders?

From our experience, here are some of the key considerations:. When the quality of a project does not align with stakeholder expectations, there is a significant risk that the project will not be successful. Poor quality code can occur for a number of reasons, for example when projects are underestimated and developers rush to complete the iteration.

What is bad code? Poor quality code can mean a number of things. The code may be difficult to read, meaning it is difficult for other developers to review or make changes.

It might have been rushed and released without testing, therefore full of bugs that could have been prevented. In other words, poor quality code creates a risk of technical debt. How do you define technical debt? Technical debt is essentially any code that decreases the agility of a software project in the long-term. Usually it is created by taking shortcuts when writing code, in order to achieve goals faster.

However, code quality is important because it reduces the long-term development effort of a project by making the project more easy to understand, maintain, and extend. Risk mitigation can often be collaborative, with an entire team devoted to creating the list before a project is launched. These risks may also need to be adjusted as the software testing project progresses. Flexibility here will be essential to ensuring that QA teams can meet and appropriately respond to any situation that may arise for more expedient risk mitigation and limited downtime.

On the other hand, it involves all means available for humans, or in particular, for a risk management entity person, staff and organization. QA teams must in addition handle unanticipated risk. These are most commonly reduced into two issues — the Anticipated Unknowns and the Unanticipated Unknowns.

Anticipated unknown risks are circumstances of which the QA team is generally aware, but unaware as to whether the risk will show up in a specific test project or procedure. This lack of knowledge may be due to ineffective communication with clients and stakeholders. Unanticipated unknown risks are those of which the organization has no awareness. Unanticipated unknown risks commonly occur when new technologies with which the QA team has no experience are introduced into a project.

Software risk planning is crucial to the success of QA testing and the resulting deployment. Set up a testing plan that highlights workflow procedures that contribute towards risk mitigation.

Image Source: Tutorials Point. Success in mitigating software risk stems directly from upfront assessment of project challenges:. When Quality Assurance is entrusted with developing a strategic testing plan, it is also entrusted with effectively addressing the risks associated with software development.

Software testing for a deadline presents pressure and time constraints are a constant challenge for QA teams. Integrated testing, or testing during software development iterations, is one way to find problems early, better ensuring quick and effective fixes.

Integrated testing works best with the incremental agile development process , where small units of development are completed in sequence as virtually deliverable products. In addition, prioritizing testing sequences by placing functionalities more crucial to software performance at the front of the testing queue, goes far towards mitigating risk.

To best determine the priorities of a testing sequence, first determine the level of risk, including the following risk categories:. Scheduling Risk : Testing projects are not efficiently or completely scheduled to meet the deployment deadline.

Inefficiency in scheduling can include:. Operational Risk: Ineffective processing, system failures, or unanticipated circumstances define operational risk.



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