The Test Management Body of Knowledge

As approved by the IIST Advisory Board, the Test Management Body of Knowledge consists of the following seven areas:

1. Test Process Management

1. Effort estimation
2. Quality policies, processes, and standards
3. Defining quality goals
4. Process definition
5. Process control
6. Process documentation
7. Relationship with service management infrastructure processes (incident management, problem management, configuration management, change management, release management, etc.)
8. Best practices, including use of both static and dynamic testing
9. Test processes for different development models (XP, RAD, JAD, waterfall, etc.)
   
   

2. Test Project Management

1. Test planning
2. Effort estimation
3. Task identification
4. Scheduling
5. Tracking
6. Reporting
7. Resource allocation (people, hardware, software, and facilities)
8. Identification of roles and responsibilities
9. Project controls
10. Financial analysis and ROI
11. Metric tracking and presentation
12. Presentation skills
13. Using GANTT/PERT charts and other project management techniques
14. Using automated project management tools
15. Directing, supervising, and assessing individuals' performance
16. Leadership
    

3. Test Process Measurement and Improvement

1. Test coverage analysis
2. Incident tracking and management
3. Defining and capturing test measurements
4. Basic "best practices" development metrics
5. Alternative measurement goal-setting with the Basili goal/question/metric paradigm
6. Test maturity models
7. Establishing process goals
8. Performing assessments and using surveys
9. Benchmarking
10. Overview of process improvement models such as CMM/CMMI, Six Sigma, TQM, ISO, etc.
11. Overview of the applicable IEEE documentation standard
    

4. Test Organization Management

1. Resource management.
2. Staffing, hiring, contracting, and reviewing performance.
3. Equipment, facilities, hardware, and software resource management
4. Politics
5. Training and career development
   Ethics
6. Team building and retention
7. Compensation
8. Budgeting
9. Presentation skills including data preparation
   

5. Risk Management

1. Risk analysis methodologies
2. Risk identification, classification, and prioritizations
3. Calculating costs and probability
4. Risk reporting
5. Monitoring and controlling risks
6. Contingency planning and mitigation
7. Risk-based test planning and management: sizing and resource planning
   
   

6. Test Automation Strategies and Architecture

1. Defining a test automation strategy and plan
2. Test tool evaluation and selection
3. Build it vs. Buy it: automation strategies approaches
4. Developing skills and relevant test automation roles
5. Long term maintenance considerations
6. Selecting which tests to automate and converting from manual to automated
7. Calculating ROI of automation
8. Building a performance test team
9. Process automation and metric analysis
10. Test environments - test data, architecture, security, networks, etc.
11. Categories of automated tools that can be used to aid testing
    

7. Software Quality Assurance

1. Quality Assurance Vs Quality Control
2. Defining processes
3. Implementing Quality Assurance
4. Developing effective standards
5. Inspections and review of artifacts other than code
6. Development and Test lifecycles and methodologies
7. QA concepts, methods and approaches Prominent quality assurance model such as:
1. CMM/CMMI
2. Six Sigma
3. IEEE standards
4. TQM
5. ISO
8. ROI justification for Quality Assurance
9. Quality Assurance according to W. Edwards Deming
10. Quality Assurance for modern development methodologies: RAD, Agile and eXtreme
11. Independent Verification and Validation