Managing the Software Testing Process

(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

Managing software testing processes is challenging due to the very nature of testing: it depends on other stakeholders in terms of timelines, deliverables, technology and sometimes even resources. To bring real value, test management should be solid enough to ensure proper validation of the system-under-test and at the same time flexible enough to align itself with the changing schedules, technologies and software development models. The course will focus on different aspects of planning, controlling and improving software testing processes in order to bring this value. Besides going through the Planning - Design - Execution - Reporting core of the testing process, we will touch upon the management aspects of test automation, and discuss different facets of testing HR.

Participants will learn:

• Defining testing activities as appropriate for the life cycle model utilized
• The principles, scope and best practices of test planning
• The basics and beyond of defect management
• Management aspects of test design and execution
• The ways to measure and control the testing process
• Principles of test automation and its place in software life cycle
• HR foundations of testing
• Approaches to improving the testing process

Outline

• What the course is about
  • Scope: what do we cover in depth, what do we glance over, what we do not cover
  • Goals: what will we learn
  • Administrative items
• Testing in Software Life Cycle
  • The expectations from testing
    • Testing perspective
    • Quality Assurance perspective
    • Management perspective
    • Development perspective
    • Client perspective
    • Regulatory perspective
    • Other perspectives
• Testing in different Life Cycle models
  • Development, Implementation and Certification projects
  • Waterfall, Iterative, Agile and other development modes
• Improving the Quality of Requirements
  • Requirements reviews: form
  • Requirements reviews: content
  • Requirements checklists
• Test Planning
  • Defining the scope
  • Outlining the approach
  • Determining the testing levels and types
  • Scheduling
  • Defect Reporting
  • Tools
  • Resources
  • Risk Management
• Test Design
  • Test Cases and Test Data
  • Special cases
• Defect Management
  • Good and bad defect reports
  • Severity, priority and the rest of meta-data
  • The importance of history
  • Making decisions based on reported defects
  • Defect metrics to improve processes
• Test Reporting
  • Light reporting
  • Comprehensive reporting
• Controlling the Testing Process
  • Measures and Metrics
    • Product
    • Process
  • Monitoring and Control mechanisms
• The HR of Testing
  • Skill sets
  • The psychology of testing
  • Training - general and specific
• Test Automation
  • Test automation architecture
  • Test automation for development, implementation and certification projects
  • Performance testing & what happens after the release