Business value of testing
While most organizations consider testing valuable in
some sense, few managers, including Test Managers, can
quantify, describe, or articulate that value.
Many test managers, test leads or testers focus on the
tactical details of testing (aspects specific to the task or
test level) while ignoring the larger strategic (higher level)
issues related to testing that other project participants care
about.
The Test Manager must work to optimize
testing so that good business value is delivered:
Testing excessively does not deliver good
business value, because the testing will
impose unreasonable delays and cost
more than it saves.
Testing too little does not deliver good business value
because too many defects will be delivered to users
The optimum lies between those two extremes and the
Test Manager must help testing stakeholders understand
this and the value delivered by testing.
Testing delivers value to the organization, project, and/or
operation in both quantitative and qualitative ways:
Qualitative values such as:
improved reputation for quality
smoother and more-predictable releases
increased confidence, protection from liability
reducing risk of loss of whole missions or lives
Quantitative values such as:
include finding defects that are prevented or fixed
prior to release
finding defects that are known prior to release (not
fixed but documented, with workarounds)
reducing risk by running tests
delivering information on project, process, and
product status
The Test Manager should understand which of these
values apply for their organization, project, and/or
operation, and be able to communicate about testing in
terms of these values.
A well-established method for measuring the
quantitative value and efficiency of testing is called cost
of quality (or, sometimes, cost of poor quality).
It involves classifying project and operational costs into
four categories related to product defect costs:
Costs of prevention training developers to write more
maintainable or secure code
Costs of detection writing test cases, configuring test
environments, and reviewing requirements
Costs of internal failure fixing defects detected during
testing or reviews, prior to delivery
Costs of external failure support costs associated with
defective software delivered to customers
Distributed, outsourced or
insourced testing
Some or perhaps even all of the test effort is done by
people in different locations, employed by different
companies, or separated from the project team.
Distributed = test effort occurs at multiple locations
Outsourced = test effort is carried out at one or more
locations by people who are not employees of the
company and who are not co-located with the project team
Insourced = test effort is carried out by people who are
co-located with the project team but who are not fellow
employees
