Software testing should be a risky business
Published: 01 Jul 2005 11:45 BST
We've seen projects where 500 people were involved in testing. It wasn't their main job, they were brought in from all sorts of areas, but they brought their expertise in for the areas that affected them. Many projects have a large teams of external testers brought in — that will diminish. And people are learning to monitor errors, to analyse what happens during operation.
Such as?
We saw one bank that launched a big new service with a bunch of forms, but they had no time to check the forms before the project went live. Suddenly, they discovered that there were a load of requests from their Birmingham office for information in Welsh. It turned out that the Welsh tick box was too close to the 'no more info' tick box. Monitoring the errors showed this."
Testing can provide information. It's about clarity — it provides clarity and confidence. You can use information from the exercise for all sorts of things, such as focusing resources in problem areas.
If you don't test, you must understand the risk. And the more you align testing with your business plans, the more you get out of it
What should smaller companies do, if they're not in the market for blue-chip consultancies?
The inability for management teams to scope and assess the testing requirements accurately when introducing new systems and applications is typical in any organisations regardless of size. But for SMEs, a flawed testing framework impeding IT system and applications coming in on time and on budget is perhaps even more costly.
The key to effective testing for SMEs is raising awareness of testing techniques at a management level and quickly giving staff involved the skills required to do the job effectively. A skill injection could come as part of an investment in training course or in recruiting a new member to the company with the skills/experience to fill the gap.
The cost of using external suppliers/experts for testing is usually a barrier. Training and raising internal skills and capabilities is a very realistic solution, but SMEs should also think about analysing how the reductions in development time and support activities that come with effective testing outweigh the cost."
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