Rapid Software Testing.
Most of large organization in the world along with my company also have decided not to rely on pretense and 40 year-old ideas that were discredited 30 years ago. They are instead putting in place a system to recruit and grow highly skilled and highly motivated testers.
The companies are highly investing to identify and encourage testing champions who could become the role models and mentors for the rest of the group. Anyone may aspire to be in this special group, but to be recognized requires that the candidate tester demonstrate vigorous self-education and critical analysis. One of such demonstration has evolved the RST (Rapid Software Testing).
When this was implemented in my organisation some of the testers in the group began as strong skeptics of Rapid Testing. But the methodology is designed for skeptics– it is based on skill development and heuristics rather than pushing “best practices.” In Rapid Testing, the skilled tester is always in charge, not pieces of paper or officious charts.
RST requires each tester to employ his own judgment and technical analysis, much like what airlines expect of pilots, or hospitals expect of doctors. That can’t work on a large scale without a strong corporate commitment to training and personal ethics. Management must drive out fear, so that testers are willing to take the sort of risks that come from making their own decisions about test strategy. But the onus is on the testers to earn personal credibility within an internal community that can effectively police itself. Any tester, at any time, is expected to stand up and explain and defend his work.
Till now, I’m aware of only two large companies in the world that have made a commitment to this kind of professionalism, which is an altogether different sort of professionalism than the ceremonial certification variety that is promoted by most organizations. Such commitment has to be strongly supported by the top management, and I have personally witnessed when this was implemented in my mid size company only in my project, in my weeks of working with them, that the testers at had fire in their eyes. There are testers everyone in world who deserve to have an international reputation.
Rapid testing can be extended with the following activities to make sure the test results are properly aligned and useful to the client.
Analyze bug list
Assess bug report quality
Reproduce bugs
Close duplicates and non-bugs
Add labels and categorize according to risk
What did the client know about before we started?
What does the client consider important that we found?
Produce “official” test coverage outline
Produce “official” Risk List
Produce official sequence of events
Describe our test activities
Analyze test session reports
Describe what we did not test
Analyze tools used
Identify outstanding student work
Write report narrative and summary
In a real project, our reporting (other than the bug list itself) is either oral, or expressed in brief written statements. On a normal project, once we get organized (after a few days if it’s a new project) reporting gets pretty easy.
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