Managing the Test Project

Course available as online self-paced

Course available to schedule for your team

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Concepts

Testing is a sub-project within an overall development project. To be successful, testing needs to be managed effectively like any other project, while also addressing testing's unique aspects, which can make it even more challenging than the already difficult job of managing a typical project. This intensive interactive course shows how to manage testing as a project so it provides effective testing on time and within budget. This course also helps test managers effectivelycommunicate the value of their testing and negotiate for scarce time, resources, and influence. Exercises provide practice applying the techniques and learning how to avoid common pitfalls. This course is designed for systems and business managers, project managers, project leaders, analysts and other professionals who manage software projects.

Participants will learn:

How testing must be managed as a project in its own right and also as part of the larger project.
Using test planning to identify tasks and approaches needed for successful testing outcomes.
Methods for reliably estimating the time, effort, costs, and resources required.
Techniques for scheduling tasks to reduce risks and optimize resource assignment utilization.
Roles, responsibilities, leadership, direction, and supervision for team member performance.
Project control tools and techniques for tracking and reporting measures of project accomplishment.

Outline

Testing is a Project to be Managed
- Project nature and critical success factors
- Most important determinant of success
- Testing as a project within overall project
- Why knowing how to test is not enough
- Key Project Manager roles/competencies
- Project management, development lifecycles
- Why we get impossible deadlines/budgets
- Countering Parkinson's Law
- Establishing credibility, managing by facts
- Testing's double budget/schedule whammy
- Project Manager, Test Manager deliverables
- Test Managers must excel Project Managers
- Projects succeed/fail in the first 15 minutes
Test Planning Value Not Busywork
- Planning purposes, key to project delivery
- Conventional reactive test planning
- Proactive Testing Ô risk-based strategy
- IEEE Std. test planning structure benefits
- Test planning vs. test design
- Master Test Plan counterpart to project plan
- Identifying what must be demonstrated
- Approach, use of automated tools
- Entry/exit criteria, anticipating change
- Defining scope so it doesn't creep
- Testing to business vs. system requirements
- Testing roles and responsibilities
- Enlisting and leveraging developers
- Authority and reporting relationships
- Communicating value of testing
Estimating Time, Effort, Resources
- Top-down vs. bottom-up estimates
- Overcoming major source of estimate errors
- Work breakdown structure, scaling by levels
- Identifying ordinarily overlooked tasks
- Addressing divergent resource productivity
- Gauging deliverables size and complexity
- Metrics the Test Manager needs to know
- Manual vs. automated productivity
- PERT and weighted averages risk reduction
- Productive time scheduling practicalities
- Gantt charts and resource leveling
- Dependency networks, Critical Path/Chain
- Contingencies and Plan B
- Cost/benefit analysis and communication
- Negotiating commitments and resources
Directing and Controlling Testing
- Management vs. leadership
- Delegating and encouraging effort
- Motivation, rewards, and recognition
- Supervising and reviewing performance Manager is between team and organization
- Monitoring against budget and schedule
- Assuring quality of the testing, too
- Catching problems and adjusting in-process
- Earned value measure of completion
- Automated tools, strengths and limits
- Tracking, analyzing, reporting defects
- Automated tools suitability, warnings
- Reporting to management, key to influence