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

8.8. Exercises

1. Discuss how well your personal attitudes fit into the qualifications of professional pessimism, balanced curiosity, and ability to focus.

2. Sketch a critical skills worksheet for testing a video game. Sketch the worksheet for testing control software for an automated factory. Compare and contrast, commenting on the similarities and differences.

3. Calculate the defect detection percentage for your test team on a recent project, using three months as the time window for 90 percent of the customer-discovered bugs to arrive. (See Chapter 4 for a refresher on how to calculate this metric.)

   • Calculate without adjusting for scope limitations. In other words, every unique, true bug found by customers in the first three months counts "against" the DDP.

   • Recalculate, eliminating from the customer-discovered bug count any bugs that were out of scope or could no t have reasonably been found during the test effort.

   • Propose and describe a reasonable bonus system based on one of these DDP calculations.

4. Find a partner and practice some of the interviewing techniques discussed in this chapter. Figures 8.12 through 8.17 present a sequence of job descriptions and résumés; each résumé matches or is a fit for the preceding job description. (These materials are available for your convenience on the Web site.) Pick a job description/résumé pair with your partner and try out some of the ideas in this chapter. If you have access to a computer and the test cases and bug reports from previous chapters, ...