Effective Test Management (CSTP #3) or (CTM Elective) or (CSTAS Elective)

This course covers area 3 of the Test Professional Body of Knowledge requirements. This course also covers the Elective area for the Certified Test Manager (CTM) and the CSTAS certification.

For costs and cities where this course might be offered, please see the right border of this page or to bring this course to your test team at your location, contact our Education and Professionals Services Group.

Concepts

Testers need to understand about managing testing, even when they don’t personally play a present management role.  More fully understanding what test management involves makes one a more productive test team contributor now and helps position for accepting greater management responsibilities in the future.  While test planning often is the most visible test management activity, it is only one of multiple needed proficiencies which too often receive inadequate skilled attention.  This interactive workshop creates awareness of diverse areas that must be managed for testing to provide needed value within software development projects’ chosen life cycles.  The course shows ways to organize, direct, and control testing resources to accomplish more of the important testing in limited time while actually enabling earlier software delivery.  Exercises enhance learning.

Participants will learn:

• What test management is and why it is important.
• Relationship of test types and their management to development life cycle approaches.
• A structured Proactive TestingÔ process that yields better software and also cuts development time.
• An industry-accepted structured approach to test planning and its benefits.
• Management’s role in conducting, controlling, and reporting testing tasks.

Outline

• INTRODUCTION TO TEST MANAGEMENT
  • Defining test management
  • How it differs from testing
  • Issues with how testing is managed now
  • Other management relevant to testing
  • When testing’s real purpose is misunderstood
  • Importance of testing-quality relationship
  • Impact of how one defines testing
  • Testing for correctness vs. testing for errors
  • Developer views of testing, significance
  • Acceptance challenge
  • Defect measures and test effectiveness
  • Error sources by phase
  • Defect economics and challenges
  • Why testing needs to be managed
  • Challenges to managing testing
• WHAT TO MANAGE
  • Multiple areas to manage
  •   Impact of lack of awareness
  • Your defined testing process
  • Where test management fits in
  • What is a process and why it matters
  • Process relation to project and product results
  • Measuring processes
  • Controlling and improving performance
  • REAL vs. Presumed Processes
  • Making effective changes
  • Out of time, not out of tests
  • Your REAL testing process
  • Recognizing why you get your REAL results
  • CAT-Scan Approach™ to find more defects
  • Static and dynamic testing and power
  • V-Model levels of testing objectives
  • Value of independent testers
  • Typical place of testing with life cycle
  • Waterfall strengths and weaknesses
  • Iterative/prototyping, timeboxing
  • Agile XP development integrates testing
  • Backbone daily builds and testing
  • Rational Unified Process testing role
  • Traditional reactive testing issues
  • Proactive TestingÔ better, quicker, cheaper
• TEST PLANNING-VALUE NOT BUSYWORK
  • Six purposes of planning
  • Testing is main method of controlling risk
  • Quantifying risk factors and exposure
  • Traditional vs. Proactive risk identification
  • IEEE Std. 829 for test planning, design
  • Benefits of structure, Proactive approach
  • Test plans, designs, cases distinctions
  • Identifying commonly-overlooked risks
  • Planning/estimating the testing work
  • Test management’s resource/time issues
  • Managing performance of the testing work
  • Collecting and reporting meaningful measures
  • Evaluating/addressing test effectiveness