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Combining Defining Quality and Exploratory Testing Models

 In my previous few posts I have talked about a couple of things.

  1. What does quality look like? This talked about understanding what quality looks like using quality attributes.
  2. A model for exploratory testing. This talked about based upon risk, across 3 factors, how you can come up with a way to decide how much exploratory testing you need to do.

This post will talk about how these 2 things fit together

The above diagram that shows how these 2 things can work in tandem to enable you to decide how to test a new feature.

Let's look at each stage….

Stage 1 

Quality Attributes

At this stage you identify the quality attributes that may be affected by the feature. Depending on your quality attributes this may include things such as:

  • Usability
  • Performance
  • Reliability
  • Security

Other Risk Factors

Also at this stage you can define how you will measure the other risk factors that are part of the model for exploratory testing. The aim here is to define the following:

  • What levels you will have for feature complexity, developer experience and impact the client
  • How will you measure the amount of exploratory testing you will do based upon the combination of complexity, developer experience and impact to client

Stage 2

At this stage you: 

  • Assess what risks impact each quality attribute as well as the level of risk. For example this could be that the new feature could pose a high risk to the performance attribute because the feature will have to do a lot of database calls. The output of this will be that all risks to the quality attributes have been identified as well as their risk level
  • Analyse each of the risk factors for the feature. So this is assigning levels for complexity, developer experience and impact to client for the feature. The output of this will be the levels for the complexity, impact to client and developer experience.

Stage 3

Now that you have the output from stage 2 you now have the information needed to help you come up with the actions and decisions that are required in order to test the feature. These actions and decisions should help do the following:

  • Manage risks to the quality attributes For example, How will the team manage the risk to the effect on performance? Will there be additional performance tests added?
  • To manage the risks at a team, technology and client level. This is manifested in the amount of exploratory testing that will be done on the feature and will be defined by the levels identified in stage 2.  What this is doing is thinking about other risks outside of the teams defined quality attributes and looks more at the team (developer experience), technology (complexity) and client (impact to client) risks that can impact the quality of a feature.

Stage 4

This brings us onto stage 4. Once all other stages are done you now as a team can make a decision about how, why, where and when the testing will be performed for that feature.  By working through this process you understand the risks and can put plans in place to manage them with your testing strategy for the feature.

Now who does that testing is a discussion for another post……..

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