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

2.7. Quality Risks

If you followed the process discussed in Chapter 1, you already have the material you need for this section. Either you can summarize the quality risk documents you've prepared, or simply reference them in the test plan. If you suspect that many of your readers won't look at the referenced documents, it makes sense to summarize the quality risks here, given that your purpose is to communicate as well as to plan. However, if you know that people support your test planning process and will take the time to read your outline of quality risks or your failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) chart, you can save yourself some work by referencing them.

I also like to cross-reference the test strategy and the test environments against the various risk categories. For example, if I know I'm going to use a particular configuration of a server and run primarily behavioral, manual tests to find potential functionality bugs (those mitigating the risks to quality in terms of functionality), then one row in my quality risks table might look as shown in Table 2.2.

Figure 2.2. A context diagram for a distributed test effort.

Table 2.2. An Extract of a Quality Risks Table

QUALITY RISK CATEGORY	SERVER CONFIGURATION	TEST STRATEGY
Functionality	Solaris/Oracle/Apache	Manual Behavioral Primarily scripted Some exploratory