CQAA February 2013 Speaker Program: Risk-Based Testing: Focused Effort, Better Results

About the Topic

Do you want higher confidence that you are testing the right things at the right time? Would it be helpful to better focus and justify test effort in terms of reducing the cost of the project test phase and reducing future potential production costs? Are you responsible for testing a product where the cost of failure is high? Often other activities before test execution are delayed, putting pressure on the test schedule. Risk-based testing allows teams to deliver increasingly sophisticated, complex products, within tightening constraints, while credibly prioritizing testing and balancing quality with other priorities.

Key Learning Objectives

This Presentation will define risk-based testing and explain why it is needed.

• We’ll discuss two approaches to risk analysis, examine three classes of risk-based testing heuristics, and outline three ways to organize risk-based testing
• We’ll consider how a checklist of project warning signs can be used to inform testing strategy and then walk-through a nine-step process to do risk-based testing
• We’ll also cover the use of metrics to identify the probability and the consequences of individual risks (errors) if they occur, and to monitor test progress

About the Speakers

Scott Stribrny is the Cofounder, President, and Managing Director of Group Atlantic, Inc., a consulting firm that has advised private, commercial, and governmental organizations on successful strategy development and operations improvement since 1992. He is also a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Business Technologies Strategies practice and Enterprise Risk Management & Governance practice. He is currently advising on techniques for effective product requirement specification and risk management. 

Mr. Stribrny has more than 30 years experience in systems specification and building. He has designed and built real-time mission critical software and has led successful multi-year, multimillion-dollar development programs. Mr. Stribrny is a co-founder and former leader of the Chicago Software Process Improvement Network. He can be reached at Scott.Stribrny@GroupAtlantic.com.