Managing the Test Process in Iterative and Incremental Projects

(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

This course focuses on practical issues faced by increasing numbers of testers. These issues arise because most corporations are still fairly traditionally structured even though many software development teams are heading full steam into modern iterative, incremental, component based, agile software development techniques. This leaves corporate testers stuck coping with an organizational and technical paradigm shift that traditional policies and practices are inadequate to handle. The highly iterative environment characteristic of these modern development projects has a dramatic and comprehensive effect on all aspects of testing including test planning, scheduling, budgeting, risk assessment, overall test asset allocation and fundamental organizational issues. This course presents a disciplined approach of how to integrate testing processes with iterative/incremental software engineering practices. Attendees learn how to plan, create and execute effective tests for modern software systems. The course isfounded on the philosophy that mature agile approaches to software development, while markedly unique, are as disciplined as any other mature software development approach.

Outline

• Context
  • Iterative/incremental
  • Agile
  • Quasi-Agile
  • Organizational issues
  • Agile requirements and test cases
• Planning
  • Up front planning
  • Incremental planning
• Scheduling
  • Scheduling at the beginning of the project
  • Scheduling the testing activities for an increment
  • Test first development
  • Coordinating between embedded testing and independent testing
  • Specialized testing
• Reporting
  • Bug reporting and tracking
  • Progress assessment reports
  • Quality assessment reports
• Resources
  • Human resources
  • Software resources
  • Hardware resources
  • Other
• Risk Management
  • Identifying and quantifying risk
  • Mapping risk to requirements and test cases
  • Which test cases do we run
  • Which test cases do we automate
• Measuring and improving the test process
  • Agile metrics
  • Retrospectives
  • CMMI