Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
for some amount of training. After this exercise, you still will be left with skills that
have no matching available skills. In all such cases you may be required either to hire
additional staff or to provide complete training to existing staff who will work on
those assignments.
...
Risk Factors
OK! So you have made a good plan that seems to be perfect. You have taken care
of technical, people, and customer aspects that can impact your project. But in real
life, most unexpected things can happen. Just yesterday the U.S. economy seemed
to be chugging along strongly. Those big and blue corporations seemed infallible.
But today the biggest and mightiest corporations have fallen flat on their bellies.
The fall is so huge that the biggest economy in the world is shaking and it is going
to change the world of business forever.
This kind of earth-shattering fate can happen with your project. So it is very
important that you evaluate all kinds of risks before making your plan. Identify
each and every risk that can impact your project. Make suitable (even more than
suitable will be appropriate here!) allowances for each of these risks. These risks can
be broadly categorized as technological risks, human risks, scheduling risks, etc.
To understand some of the risk aspects, let us look at a case study.
There is a software vendor who makes software that is used by big retailers in the
United States for managing their back office, stores, and flow of goods and informa-
tion with suppliers and customers. The application is built on the latest technology.
3.6.1
Technological Risks
Suppose the application you are going to test involves testing a Web-based Java
application as well as testing its integration with a mobile module. The mobile mod-
ule has a component that depends on information about tracking location of the
truck using a GPS (Global Positioning System) service. What technological factors
should be considered risks for testing this mobile module?
Here is a list:
1. Does a suitable mobile emulator exist which will help in testing this module?
2. Can this mobile emulator be installed successfully on your existing hardware
and operating platform?
3. Does your testing team have prior experience in testing such mobile modules?
4. Does the main application integrate successfully with this mobile emulator?
Is data flowing both ways between the main application and the emulator?
5. Does testing also involve getting real geographic coordinates data on the
mobile and then finding its location based on this data? If this is the case,
then this test case will need to be tested by using an actual mobile handset
and getting real geographic coordinates data on it using any GPS service.
