{"id":60,"date":"2009-07-21T10:16:35","date_gmt":"2009-07-21T00:16:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quinert.com\/blog\/xml-rss2.php?itemid=93"},"modified":"2013-09-05T10:33:08","modified_gmt":"2013-09-05T00:33:08","slug":"thinking-about-test-strategy-a-mnemonic-device","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/2009\/07\/21\/thinking-about-test-strategy-a-mnemonic-device\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking about Test Strategy &#8211; A mnemonic device"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve recently been on the move a little, and have had a lot of chances to work on test strategy.  I generally have historical documents to work from, but decided I should try to come up with a mnemonic device to ensure that I have all of the critical conversations that I need.<\/p>\n<p>One of the most influential things for this was the RUP development case that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ruschena.org\/michael\">Michael Ruschena<\/a> presented when I worked with him at ANZ.  This documented the team approach we had agreed upon to deliver a solution to the customer&#8217;s needs when working on our first agile project.  This was one of the first times I was really conscious of &#8220;software development as applied problem solving&#8221;, prior to encountering Gerry Weinberg&#8217;s work.  Paul Szymkowiak also commented that my test strategy reproduces a lot of what would be in the RUP vision artefact.  I realised that in many cases, that&#8217;s true.  Before deciding on the testing mission, what I&#8217;m frequently trying to facilitate is consensus on the project or business goals.<\/p>\n<p>So that&#8217;s how this helps me.  I hope it might help you.    To that end, I present the first public version of my test strategy mnemonic &#8211; &#8220;GRATEDD SCRIPTS&#8221;.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Goals &#8211; What are the critical goals of the product?  What are the things that absolutely must work?<\/li>\n<li>Risks &#8211; What things are we hoping to avoid?  What bad things might happen?  What are we doing to address these?<\/li>\n<li>Approach &#8211; How are we going to test this?  How we will work together?  Who will do what?\u00a0 Accountabilities may also be considered here.<\/li>\n<li>Tradeoffs &#8211; What tradeoffs we are prepared to make in order to deliver the desired business outcomes?<\/li>\n<li>Environments &#8211; What environments do we have or need?  What testing will we do in those environments?<\/li>\n<li>Dependencies &#8211; Is anyone &#8216;outside&#8217; the project depending on us?  Are we depending on anyone?  Are there external gates or constrained resources?<\/li>\n<li>Data &#8211; Where will data come from?  Are there any special needs?<\/li>\n<li>Stakeholders &#8211; Who has a stake in the software\/product\/test effort?  What are their goals? Who is accountable for what? \u00a0Who needs to be involved in signoffs and reviews?<\/li>\n<li>Coverage models &#8211; What models will we use to know that we are testing the things we care about?  What models will drive test design and test coverage discussions?<\/li>\n<li>Resources &#8211; Who is available to help with testing?  What other resources might we need?  What&#8217;s the budget?<\/li>\n<li>Information needs &#8211; What information needs to come out of the testing process?  What decisions does it need to support?  What are we trying to learn?<\/li>\n<li>Prioritisation &#8211; What is most important?  How will we resolve competing interests, tasks or tests?<\/li>\n<li>Tooling &#8211; Will any special tools be required?  Will support be needed to develop these?<\/li>\n<li>Schedule &#8211; What are the important dates and timings?Some of the items overlap, but that&#8217;s OK for my brain.  Different prompts cause me to consider things in a different light.Ben Kelly proposed &#8216;Budget&#8217; as a separate item.  For myself, I cover this in Resources, but if you work in an environment where you are more hands-on with budgets than I typically am, you might find the mnemonic &#8220;B-GRADED SCRIPTTS&#8221; to help you with a more explicit &#8216;B for Budget&#8217; reminder.So next time you are thinking about what your test effort should look like, try to work through the above points and see if there is anything you&#8217;re missing.  Try to come up with your own mnemonic devices too to help you remember things that are important.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve recently been on the move a little, and have had a lot of chances to work on test strategy. I generally have historical documents to work from, but decided I should try to come up with a mnemonic device to ensure that I have all of the critical conversations that I need. One of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,22,30,31,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-heuristic-testing","category-modelling-skills","category-software-testing","category-strategy","category-test-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":657,"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions\/657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}