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

10.5. Exercises

1. Suppose that an external test lab, located in Taiwan, and a vendor, located in India, are participating in your test effort. (Your offices are located in the central time zone of the United States.) They send you bug reports by email and you have a test technician enter them into the bug tracking system.

   Figure 10.5. A distributed test project.

   

   • Due to the time difference, bug reports get into the bug tracking system after almost a full day's lag. How will this affect your test dashboard? Is the effect significant?

   • Assume a test release comes out once a week on Monday morning. It takes two days for the release to be transmitted securely to the vendor and the test lab. Assuming they both work from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. local time, when is the earliest you would expect confirmation, regression, and planned testing to commence (in terms of central U.S. time) at each location?

   • Assuming that confirmation testing concludes in a day and bugs identified in the test release notes are reported by email as fixed or not fixed by the end of the day, how does this lag affect your test dashboard? Is the effect significant?

2. One of the frequently cited concerns about outsourcing testing to third-party test company is that the consultancy's or lab's testers might not have sufficient knowledge of the application domain of the system. Based on the critical skills discussion in Chapter ...