Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
many must-fix defects are found by them. Effectiveness of the testing is known only
at that time.
Some of the risks that could impact a software testing project include com-
munication gaps, cultural risks, skills risk, experience on technology risks,
process risk, project size risk, infrastructure risk, overcommitment, poor plan-
ning, and so on. As software testing project manager, you have to find ways to
mitigate these risks for your project. First, you will have to identify all kinds
of risks specific to your project. Then you will have to plan to mitigate these
potential risks.
Each risk has its own intensity of impact on the project. The intensity of each
risk should be measured so that its impact on the project can be measured. There
are some methods to measure impact of risk on the project. It can be measured
using heuristics and intuition or using a quantitative method like assigning weights
to each risk or putting a dollar value to each risk. There is not yet any method that
can quantify the exact impact of a particular risk on a project. It is because no
two projects are exactly the same and the intensity of any risk will be different on
these projects. So the best approach is to use a combination of these methods. For
this reason the test manager must have experience in executing similar projects so
that he can apply heuristics and intuition to the project risks to some extent after
using other methods to evaluate and assess the impact of risks on his project. How
much weight should the project manager assign to each identified risk? This is a big
question, and there is no easy answer to this. Here again experience counts. For
instance, if you have never worked on a software development project for a Web
application for a popular portal, you will never understand the impact of a risk of
unavailability of the application to users. There could be thousands of concurrent
users accessing that portal, and due to massive load on the application server, the
server may fail to take this load and so the portal may become unavailable to users.
Similarly a retail banking application for online access to one's account poses great
security risk of data theft. The test manager may never be able to assess the risk
involved if he has no prior experience in testing these applications. On the other
hand, if he has prior experience, then he will put appropriately more weight to these
risks and subsequently will test these aspects more thoroughly than other parts of
the application.
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Risk Measurement Method
Project risks can be measured using a structured approach. Here is a method that
can be applied in measuring the impact of any risk on the project:
1. Create a weighing scale and assign a score to each risk.
2. Count the number of times the risk occurs in the project.
