Nothing good lasts forever.  We have entered another economic downturn, and no one seems to know how long it will last.  For the foreseeable future, management will exhort testers and test teams to do more with less.  A tedious refrain, indeed, but you can improve your chances of weathering this economic storm if you take steps now to address this efficiency fixation. 

In this brief article, I'll give you four ideas you can implement to improve test efficiency.  All can show results quickly, within the next six months.  Better yet, none require sizeable investments which you could never talk your managers into making in this current economic situation.  By achieving quick, measurable improvements, you will position yourself as a stalwart supporter of the larger organizational cost-cutting goals, always smart in a down economy.

 

Know Your Efficiency
The first idea-and the foundation for the others-is that you should know your efficiency to know what to improve.  All too often, test teams have unclear goals.  Without clear goals, how can you measure your efficiency?  Efficiency at what?  Cost per what? 

Here are three common goals for test teams:
…         Find bugs
…         Reduce risk
…         Build confidence

You should work with your stakeholders-not just the people on the project, but others in the organization who rely on testing-to determine the right goals for your team.
With the goals established, ask yourself, can you measure your efficiency in each area?  What is the average cost of detecting and repairing a bug found by your test team, and how does that compare with the cost of a bug found in production?  (I describe this method of measuring test efficiency in detail in my article, "Testing ROI: What IT Managers Should Know," found in the Basic Library at www.rbcs-us.com.) What risks do you cover in your testing, and how much does it cost on average to cover each risk?  What requirements, use cases, user stories, or other specification elements do you cover in your testing, and how much does it cost on average to cover each element?  Only by knowing your team's efficiency can you hope to improve it.

[For the other three ideas, click here.  For more articles and resources, visit our Library.] 

 

Due to the overwhelming success and popularity of Foundations of Software Testing written by Dorothy Graham, Erik van Veenendaal, Isabel Evans, and Rex Black, Cengage Learning has decided to go print again!