Effective Methods for Software Testing, Third Edition

Chapter 24. Building Agility into the Testing Process

To enhance a software testing process, you must follow an improvement plan. Traditional improvement plans focus on identifying a defective component and then minimizing the impact of that defect, thus enhancing the testing process under review. This chapter uses a significantly different approach to improvement: time compression. Time compression drives agility. This process to add agility to software testing has proven in practice to be much more effective than traditional process improvement methods.

This chapter explains in detail each of the seven steps needed to build agility in to your software testing process. Each step is described in a “how-to” format. This chapter assumes that a team of testers has been assigned the responsibility to build agility into the software testing process (as discussed in Chapter 23).

Step 1: Measure Software Process Variability

A process is a method for making or doing something in which there are a number of steps. The steps and the time required to execute those steps comprise a timeline to produce the desired result. This chapter explains how to define and document those steps so that they represent a software testing process timeline. In this chapter, you also learn how to reduce variability.

If the timeline is lengthy, or if some steps are bottlenecks, or if the steps do not permit flexibility in execution, testing cannot be performed in an agile manner. Developing a software testing timeline ...