Presentation: How make the context of testing tangible and how it guides testing?

New product needed a solid testing and quality strategy for global product development and roll-out in different continents.

A development team is starting to create a new product with a global reach and they want to get serious with quality right from the start. They don’t quite know how to do it, but they know that they need guidelines for the development, deployment and other things beforehand as they know that during development there is no time to think so deeply these things and poorly planned testing just adds more costs but with little gains. They contact testing coaches to help them out.

I’ll talk how the team, together with the customer, started formulating a thorough testing strategy and how this kind of process works. It involves looking at the project, product and the environment through different quality lenses, like risks, missions and testing approaches. After this strategy is created, the team understands what affects their quality in that particular product and they know, for example, how to mitigate the risks though testing activities. During development, by using this strategy as a guideline, the team can navigate their “quality landscape” and know what kind of testing should be implemented in which stage or part of the product. Also the management can use the strategy for planning things like staffing, resourcing and scheduling the testing. But of course it must be remembered that the testing strategy evolves with the project and product will have different quality and testing goals in different stages of the lifecycle.

Key takeaways: How to create a good working test strategy and how to know and understand the context of the testing. Often we testers and other Agile people talk about the context and how it must be taken into account when doing stuff like testing. It’s not so often, though, that we are presented methods how to gain the actual knowledge of that context. Here I will talk through one method that makes that context concrete.