Improve productivity in Testing

This paper focuses on reducing the cost of software to customers and talks in detail about ‘Improving test productivity’ as one of the best practice.

Test teams are often asked, "How do you plan to improve test productivity?" AND there is an opportunity in this question for every test organization!!!

Well, there is no one answer for it!!!

On an average overall test activities effort is around 50% of development effort, which can definitely be improved. Test teams needs to start moving towards more tailored test processes which suit their business model.

A key challenge for any organization is always how to reduce COST for customer. Today the customers can be made happier

using cost reduction rather than giving ornamental features.

COST, Timelines and Quality are three most important priorities for business in today’s highly competitive market. If we don’t reduce cost for customers, they will do it in their own way!!! As the IT industry faces challenges due to economical slowdown, we need to find different ways to reduce cost for our customer so that they still see smooth ROI, and remain our customer’s.

This paper talks about causes which refrain test teams from being more productive and suggests measures to overtake them. Use of Automation right from test case preparation till test reporting along with examples/tools available at MS is explained in later sections.

Testers does spend most of their time in test case preparation, execution, and bug reporting and finally test status reporting. This paper will talk about where we lose opportunity to improve productivity at every step. Also, suggesting some productivity tools to do our job better and in more efficient manner. A suggested test lifecycle

Complete paper is attached for your further read. Please note that this paper was written with respect to my then team at Microsoft, so any mentions had to be read with this note in mind.

-Naren

Views or Opinions expressed in this blog represnt only author and not any company or organization or person.

Improve productivity in Testing.pdf

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 01, 2011
  The tools presented in this document are available only for Microsoft employees ?

• Anonymous
  December 06, 2011
  @Dan- Yes but you should be able to search equivalent tools online as well, idea here is to use such tools for productivity gains.