Critical Testing Processes: Plan, Prepare, Perform, Perfect [Paperback]

Rex Black (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0201748681 | ISBN-13: 978-0201748680 | Publication Date: August 8, 2003 | Edition: 1

In Critical Testing Processes, the author distills knowledge gained from 20 years of testing experience into twelve critical processes. These include highly visible processes by which peers and management judge competence, and mission-critical processes in which performance affects the company's profits and reputation. After each process is introduced, the author demonstrates its use through an engaging case study. Instead of cumbersome regulations, this book provides checklists--lightweight, flexible tools for implementing process-oriented testing, gathering metrics, and making incremental process changes.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

I’ve spent most of my twenty years in the software and hardware business inthe arena of testing. For the first few years as a test practitioner, I struggled tokeep my head above water. Ultimately, I mastered some basic tools and techniques.

As I learned more about testing, I started to notice certain common themes.Some of these themes had to do with events—good and bad—that happenedover and over again on software, hardware, and system projects. For some of theseevents, I found that some teams could create order in their projects. These teamshandled these common events better than the teams that bounced from one crisis tothe next, reacting constantly, immersed in chaos. The successful teams had goodprocesses.

Some of these successful project teams implemented writtenprocesses, while others accumulated “institutional knowledge” in theirwise—and sometimes prematurely gray—heads. While I have nothing againsta shared company culture, it’s hard to pass along the processes you’velearned unless you write them down-whether formally or informally, as checklists.This book takes the informal road. I describe twelve specific test processes, usingchecklists.Each process is critical to test team success.

I describe theseprocesses in chronological order. First we plan the test activities. Next we prepareto test. After that, we perform the tests. Finally, we perfect the system under testand the testing activities themselves.

Many other books have covered thetopics of preparing and performing tests in great detail. My experience is that, astesters, we generally do a good job in these areas. So, instead of rehashing what wealready know, I focus on opportunities for improvement. I devote eleven of theseventeen chapters to the topics of planning and perfecting. By far, these are theareas where we as testers have the most difficulty. This is especially true forcomplex and critical projects.

Where will this book take you? During theearly colonization of the American continent in the 1540s, Francisco Vasquez deCoronado searched the deserts of present-day Arizona and New Mexico for the SevenCities of C'bola, including El Dorado, a city whose streets were supposedly pavedwith gold. Juan Ponce De Leon searched for a Fountain of Youth. In 1911, one of thefirst management consultants, Frederick Winslow Taylor, wrote a book called ThePrinciples of Scientific Management. Taylor espoused the idea of the one bestway—the perfect process—for each activity on an assembly line or in anyother industrial enterprise. But none of these three men found streets of gold, lifewithout death, or perfect processes.

This book isn’t about Quixoticquests. There are no streets of gold that will make us effortlessly rich. Wecan’t side-step our human limitations. I don’t have infallibleprocesses. As Frederick Brooks wrote in the Mythical Man-Month, SecondEdition, we don’t have any silver bullets to kill our system projectmonsters, including the ones that live in quality and testing. That said, I havefound many ways for testers to deliver valuable information and services to theproject team, and each of these ways has its strong points and its weaknesses.

The processes in this book might differ from what you’re doing now. In somecases you’ll decide, based on the success of your current processes, thatyou’re doing a fine job already. In some cases, though, you may want toimplement improvements. I’ll discuss specific ways to do that, but two themesapply to process change throughout the book.

First, only change what’sbroken when changing it will help. Process change for its own sake, or processchange to perfect an already-good process, often doesn’t help the test team orthe organization. Indeed, such efforts can prove a dangerous distraction fromwhat’s truly important.

Second, change is often easiest when done insteps wherever possible. Change should be made as painless as possible. All theprocesses in the book were developed through incremental change as I realized that abetter way of doing things would significantly increase the value my team could add,and fine-tuned my processes to achieve that.

The processes in this bookaren’t pie-in-the-sky theory, but rather grew out of my experiences on theground as a practicing tester, test lead, and test manager. Your experiences andyour challenges will differ from mine, so be sure to adapt my processes—orcompletely reinvent your own—rather than trying to put a saddle on a cow.Following good processes can liberate you from the rote aspects of certain tasks,allowing you to focus on the fun, the fascinating, and the creative. When theprocesses you’ve adopted no longer solve the critical problems, when they needto evolve as your situations change, when they get in the way, then it’s timeto rethink how you do what you do. The processes I discuss here are lightweightchecklists (things I want to remember to do), not bureaucratic regulations (things Ihave to do because someone told me to).

I hope that this book will start youthinking about the following questions: How do we do our testing jobs every day andon every test project as best as we possibly can? How do we de-institutionalize ourknowledge of how we do what we do? Even though we have varied experiences, is therea commonality of practices that we can share for critical testing processes thatdetermine our success? This book will give you a compendium of proven testingprocesses to help jump-start the most critical testing process of all, the thinkingprocess.

0201748681P04072003

From the Back Cover

The advent of agile methodologies and test-driven development has brought software testing to the forefront of application development. Yet in today’s harried rush-to-market development environment, organizations must find a delicate balance between product release and product quality.

In Critical Testing Processes, the author distills knowledge gained from 20 years of testing experience into twelve critical processes. These include highly visible processes by which peers and management judge competence, and mission-critical processes in which performance affects the company’s profits and reputation.

After each process is introduced, the author demonstrates its use through an engaging case study. Instead of cumbersome regulations, this book provides checklists—lightweight, flexible tools for implementing process-oriented testing, gathering metrics, and making incremental process changes. By demonstrating critical processes in various organizational, operational, and technological contexts, this book shows readers how to:

Handle recurrent tests efficiently and consistently

Develop a cohesive, cooperative team that sidesteps redundancies

Build a reputation for reliability through the effective communication of test results

Define the focus of tests for maximum customer satisfaction and organizational success

Because testing is a collaborative process with the participation of staff throughout the organization, the author discusses interpersonal and cultural issues in depth. This book also devotes ample coverage to the often-overlooked areas of planning and perfecting tests. Whatever your role in testing—from test engineering to managing hundreds of test engineers—Critical Testing Processes will offer valuable insights into what you do, why it’s important, and how you can perform better.

0201748681B04222003

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Product Details

• Paperback: 608 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (August 8, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201748681
• ISBN-13: 978-0201748680
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #289,448 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

With a quarter-century of software and systems engineering experience, Rex Black is President of RBCS (www.rbcs-us.com), a leader in software, hardware, and systems testing. For over fifteen years, RBCS has delivered services in consulting, outsourcing and training for software and hardware testing. Employing the industry's most experienced and recognized consultants, RBCS conducts product testing, builds and improves testing groups and hires testing staff for hundreds of clients worldwide. Ranging from Fortune 20 companies to start-ups, RBCS clients save time and money through improved product development, decreased tech support calls, improved corporate reputation and more. As the leader of RBCS, Rex is the most prolific author practicing in the field of software testing today. His popular first book, Managing the Testing Process, has sold over 35,000 copies around the world, including Japanese, Chinese, and Indian releases, and is now in its third edition. His five other books on testing, Advanced Software Testing: Volume I, Advanced Software Testing: Volume II, Critical Testing Processes, Foundations of Software Testing, and Pragmatic Software Testing, have also sold tens of thousands of copies, including Hebrew, Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Russian editions. He has written over thirty articles, presented hundreds of papers, workshops, and seminars, and given about fifty keynotes and other speeches at conferences and events around the world. Rex is the immediate past President of the International Software Testing Qualifications Board and a Director of the American Software Testing Qualifications Board.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars When the Planning is Everything..., October 14, 2003

By 

Johanna Rothman (Arlington, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Critical Testing Processes: Plan, Prepare, Perform, Perfect (Paperback)

Rex Black helps you think about how testing can help your projects. In particular, the planning chapters (using the running example project) make many of the planning and risk management issues obvious. This book will help you determine which activities make sense for you to perform, how to analyze quality risks, how to estimate the work, and how to speak the language of the business (return vs. cost). If you only read the first seven chapters, you'll be farther ahead in your thinking about testing and preparing your group to test than you ever were before.

The prepare chapters (8-11) help you determine which people to select for your team, and how to prepare your test infrastructure, considering that test managers always have limited budgets, people, or time.

A particularly valuable piece of the perform chapters (12-13) is the discussion of how to manage the test builds, who owns what -- how to remove confusion from "which build do I test now?" to an organized plan of handoffs.

And in the perfect chapters, if you've been looking for a way to teach how to write test reports, chapter 14 is your answer.

If you're a manager, you'll use this book on every project, even if you only review the checklists to see if you've missed anything. If you'd like to become a test manager, read this book. Rex describes numerous ways of managing the testing and working with your peers across the organization, to become successful.

I highly recommend this book, whether you're starting a project, in the middle of a project, or completing one.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Testing - From inception to delivery - "How to do" book, October 12, 2003

By 

Chris DeNardis (New Berlin, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Critical Testing Processes: Plan, Prepare, Perform, Perfect (Paperback)

Critical Testing process is a book for the new test manager as well as a book for the test manager looking to refine what his or her process of testing is all about. What I liked about the book is it takes you through a fictitious company, Sumatra, whose is about to upgrade and introduce a new enhancement to their software. It is a dialog between the test managers, testers, program management, and VPs of the company. It's like reading a story with a narrator in the background commenting on what is going on. But then breaks off from the scenes talks about what was going on, and the reasons why these things had to happen that way.

As the first chapter starts out - getting the big picture. The biggest thing I have found with Test managers who are struggling in their field is not getting their test group involved - involved I mean from start - at the requirements and implementation phase, versus toward the end, where its almost too late.

The next few chapters go through is estimation and planning, as what we (test managers / test leaders) should all do is go through and then analyze the risks, come up with some estimation of time, and cost of the project. Then the ultimate, sell it too management where the project is most likely already over budgeted. Finally the sell tactic - to gain support for the test effort.

Assuming you have made it through all that planning, the next chapters talk about hiring and putting together a good test team and implementing the test cycle for what amounts to what you will be testing.

The next few chapter talk about the testing, everything from the release criteria handoff to executing test cases, reporting on the progress of testing, leveraging the opportunities and hitting some of the pitfalls. Ending with a summary of what the book was about, and putting it all together.

Some of the books I have read, I walk away with, how can I apply this book to what I am doing. This is a book where it is like a reference guide, where I can look up and gain a possible solution quickly as to how address my everyday scenarios in my test department. Or, as I have done already through ww.stickyminds.com web site, is recommend it to those new test managers who are trying to quickly get a department going, but want to do it correctly.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A creditable story, December 19, 2003

By 

Steve Splaine (Tampa, Fl United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Critical Testing Processes: Plan, Prepare, Perform, Perfect (Paperback)

This book is written for the test manager and/or project manager who oversees one or more testing efforts. The author has done a great job of taking his own personal experiences (good and bad) gleaned from years of "in the trenches" work, and threading them together into a single fictional story that he uses to illustrate his proven method of managing testing projects.
Part 1 (Chapters 1 to 7) talks about the stuff you need to do to Plan for a testing effort, such as; convincing senior management that spending money on testing is a good Return On Investment (ROI), how to get a realistic ballpark estimate for how long the testing is likely to take, and when & who should get involved in the project.
Part 2 (Chapters 8 to 11) deals with Preparing for test execution; selecting test strategies & techniques, putting a testing team together (and keeping them together), and determining the appropriate measure(s) of test coverage
Parts 3 & 4 (Chapters 12 to 17) first focuses on perhaps the most stressful phase of a testing project - test execution. When the "heat of battle" is most intense; it's useful to have examples, templates, and checklists that a test manager can draw upon to help them manage and report on the test execution in a controlled and credible manner. The book then wraps-up by discussing process improvement; what went well, and what could have been improved (no witch hunts please!).

In summary, I believe Rex has built a very comprehensive and detailed composite documentary on how he has defined and deployed the most critical processes needed to support a software testing effort.

In the vain of "full disclosure", you should know that I've known Rex for many years, and consequently I cannot be considered a completely impartial reviewer.