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Part 2: Critical steps of testing and risk assessments
What are the critical steps that every basic site test method should include?
No single method fits every organization or project, a good project manager will drawn from his or her own experiences and customize an organizations template method for each project. The following is an outline of a testing method that could be expanded and modified to fit a specific project's needs:
- Get trained
- Determine/Acquire product requirements
- Document the testing scope and then obtain approval/budget for the testing effort
- Design & build test environment
- Design & build any test scripts
- Execute the tests
- Analyze the test results
- Report findings and optionally make recommendations
- Repeat as necessary
Lack of resources is a frequent issue with testing teams. What are your suggestions for those with limited resources?
- Lobby for more resources. For instance, one usability expert I know, instead of calculating the cost of a usability test, calculates the cost of not doing a usability test.
- Do a risk assessment, to see where best to spend the few resources you have.
- Automate as much of the test as possible
How do you know when the testing is done and the product or site is ready to go live?
With a Web environment, you typically never get to completely finish all of your testing or fix all of the known defects before the product goes live. The go or no-go decision comes down to; what is the business risk to the organization of releasing the product before further testing and correcting has been done vs. the risk of not releasing the product now.
What resources do you recommend for small businesses or individuals overwhelmed with the number of resources available on website testing?
1. Get help, there are plenty of consulting firms that offer Web testing services. When evaluating candidate firms ask for references and sample deliverables.
2. Get smart, read up on the best testing practices. There are some classic books out there:
- Cem Kaner et al's "Testing Computer Software"
- Dorothy Graham "Software Test Automation"
- Edward Kit "Software Testing in the Real World"
- Elfriede Dustin "Automated Software Testing"
and more recently books specifically written on Web testing have started to appear:
- Hung Quoc Nguyen "Testing Applications on the Web"
- Steve Splaine & Stefan Jaskiel "The Web Testing Handbook"
On the Web front, I'd suggest visiting some of the following websites:
3. Get ready, don't just jump-in, plan what your going to test, above all do a risk assessment before executing anything but an exploratory test
And finally, where do you think the next testing frontier will be?
Predicting the future of the IT business is harder than trying to pick the next winner of the Kentucky Derby. However, my gut tells me that the wireless Web may be the scene of the next set of testing challenges. I suspect the current set of wireless websites and applications are relatively rudimentary compared to what we might see in the next few years.
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