Managing the Testing Process: Practical Tools and Techniques for Managing Hardware and Software Testing

5.6. Exercises

1. Assume that you are working on a large development project, leading a test team, and reporting to a project manager. Because of the large number of bugs found in the latest test cycle, your colleague, the development manager, thinks that the testing effort was not started in earnest until recently. You believe that the increase in the number of bugs is because the quality of fixes put in this release of the software is not good, specifically that there are many regressions. Can you use the test tracking spreadsheet to demonstrate this? If so, sketch a test tracking spreadsheet that might illustrate this point.^[]

   ^[] This exercise was contributed by Dr. Deepti Suri of Milwaukee School of Engineering.

2. Suppose that your project's regression testing strategy is to rerun only test cases that have failed against previous releases, rather than rerunning every test case in the test set for the test phase as shown in this chapter. In other words, in each cycle you have an ever-increasing (hopefully) number of tests that you skip because they have already passed. If you use the tracking spreadsheet shown in this chapter, this growing number of skipped tests will eventually distort the test summary and the planned test fulfillment chart, because skipped tests are counted as fulfilled. (A further complication is that skipped tests are not counted in earned value calculation, because they do not involve any planned or expended effort.) How could you modify this technique to accommodate ...