When Should You Take a Risk-based Approach to Testing and How To Implement It Right?
Hanna Shnaider, FortySeven’s chief marketing officer, explains how development companies use a risk-based testing roadmap to assist our customers reach their QA objectives. You can view her profile here.
Assume a consumer is unable to complete a payment due to a flaw discovered when testing an e-store. Alternatively, due to a flaw in the EHR’s order prescription capabilities, a patient gets prescribed a three-fold larger dose of medicine. Despite their differences in scale, both incidents illustrate product hazards.
I advocate using a risk-based approach to testing in order to reduce risk likelihood and impact. Risk-based testing (RBT) refers to the management, prioritization, and execution of testing activities in distinct functional software modules depending on the possibility and impact of risks. Continue reading this article to find out if risk-based testing is right for your project and how to get started.
What is Risk Based Testing?
Risk-based testing entails conducting tests or designing and executing scenarios in such a way that the top business risks identified by the customer, which will have a negative impact on the company, are discovered early in the life cycle in the product or feature and mitigated by implementing mitigation measures.
Cost implications, dissatisfied customers, poor user experience, and even customer loss are all possible negative consequences.
To put it another way, the RBT strategy ensures that testing is done in such a way that even if a user discovers a defect in production, it does not prevent him or her from using the software or have a significant impact on the business.
RBT refers to product risk testing. By employing a prioritizing technique for the test cases, RBT is able to determine how likely a given feature or capability in the production would fail, as well as the impact on the business in terms of cost and other damages.
As a result, Risk-Based Testing employs the notion of prioritizing the tests of a product’s features, modules, and functionalities. Prioritization is determined by the chance of a feature or capability failing in production and its impact on customers.
Does your project need risk-based testing?
In the following situations, I find risk-based testing to be useful:
- You work with mission-critical software (for example, an online banking application or an electronic health records application) and plan on ensuring that high-risk software modules are free of defects.
You may make sure that high-risk modules are of good quality by doing the following:
- Testing such modules using the most skilled, domain-trained test engineers.
- High-risk modules are tested before other application areas, when problems are easier to repair.
- Multiple data points are used to test critical functionality.
- Advanced software testing approaches, such as decision tables and state transition diagrams, are used.
- You are working with Agile and need to reduce test coverage to meet sprint deadlines without sacrificing software quality.
Streamlining regression testing is the key to Agile testing optimization. Organize two regression test suite for this: a partial regression test suite with test cases covering high-risk functionality and a full regression test suite with test cases covering all implemented modules. Running a partial regression test suite with a much lesser volume will allow you to speed up testing while still ensuring that key functionality is covered.
- Because software development took longer than expected, you must shorten the testing phase to meet the deadline
Before the creation of high-risk custom software modules is completed, you can begin verifying them. To avoid regression, make sure that the test cases run during custom software development are validating isolated software components that will not be affected by the addition of new features.
FortySeven’s risk-based testing roadmap
Consider following the roadmap software or mobile app development companies use in their projects to establish a risk-based approach to software testing:
Identify product risks
The team of custom software development companies will evaluate software requirements, design specifications, and other accessible project documentation, identifying potential risks for all functional software modules, in collaboration with software architects and developers who are well-versed in an application’s risk areas.
Analyze the hazards and rank the software modules in order of importance
Risk likelihood and impact are defined by FortySeven’s testing team. To determine the risk probability of a software module, a software development company will look at its complexity, reliance on other modules, implementation technology, custom software developer familiarity with the technology, and other relevant aspects.
FortySeven looks at the frequency with which a module is used, its business priority, the cost of rework, potential financial loss, and other variables to determine risk impact. We categorize software modules as high-, medium-, or low-risk based on the information gathered.
Plan, design, and execute testing activities based on the priority of the modules
Software development companies use the following matrix to prioritize software testing activities more quickly:
We assign test engineers with the most in-depth domain knowledge to test high-risk modules early in the SDLC using sophisticated testing approaches. Low-risk modules, on the other hand, can later on get validated in the delivery cycle by test engineers with less domain understanding and with less sophisticated testing approaches (for instance, equivalence partitioning).
Keep an eye on the dangers and make sure they are not getting out of hand
A custom software agency can keep an eye on the hazards throughout the project and change our testing accordingly.
Optimal test coverage with the least amount of effort
Risk-based testing can assist you in delivering high-quality software with the least amount of work possible. Consider the FortySeven47 IT professional support, which is backed by several years of experience in custom software development testing, if you wish to migrate to a risk-based strategy or if you wish to improve your QA using risk-based testing but aren’t sure you have the expertise to do so successfully. If your custom software development firm is still not convinced that risk-based testing is the way to go, feel free to contact any FortySeven software professionals for assistance.
