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Four Ideas for Improving Test Efficiency

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Nothing good lasts forever. We have entered another economic downturn, and no one seems to know how long it will last. For the foreseeable future, management will exhort testers and test teams to do more with less. A tedious refrain, indeed, but you can improve your chances of weathering this economic storm if you take steps now to address this efficiency fixation. In this brief article, I’ll give you four ideas you can implement to improve test efficiency. All can show results quickly, within the next six months. Better yet, none require sizeable investments which you could never talk your managers into making in this current economic situation. By achieving quick, measurable improvements, you will position yourself as a stalwart supporter of the larger organizational cost-cutting goals, always smart in a down economy.

Know Your Efficiency
Institute Risk-Based Testing
I mentioned risk reduction as a key testing goal. Many people agree, but few people can speak objectively about how they serve this goal. However, those people who have instituted analytical risk-based testing strategies can.
Let me be clear on what I mean by analytical risk-based testing. Risk is the possibility of a negative or undesirable outcome, so a quality risk is a possible way that something about your organization’s products or services could negatively affect customer, user, or stakeholder satisfaction. Through testing, we can reduce the overall level of quality risk. Analytical risk-based testing uses an analysis of quality risks to prioritize tests and allocate testing effort. We involve key technical and business stakeholders in this process.

Risk-based testing provides a number of efficiency benefits: •
You find the most important bugs earlier in test execution, reducing risk of schedule delay. •
You find more important bugs than unimportant bugs, reducing the time spent chasing trivialities. •
You provide the option of reducing the test execution period in the event of a schedule crunch without accepting unduly high risks.

You can learn more about how to implement risk-based testing in Chapter 3 of my recent book, Advanced Software Testing: Volume II. You can also read the article I co-wrote with an RBCS client, CA, on our experiences with piloting risk-based testing at one of their locations. This article is featured in the January 2009 issue of Better Software magazine.

Tighten Up Your Test Set
With many of our clients, RBCS assessments reveal that they are dragging around heavy, unnecessarily-large regression test sets. Once a test is written, it goes into the regression test set, never to be removed. However, in the absence of complete test automation, this leads to inefficient, prolonged test execution periods. The scope of the regression test work will increase with each new feature, each bug fix, each patch, eventually overwhelming the team.
Once you have instituted risk-based testing, you can establish traceability between risks and test cases, identifying those risks which you are over-testing. You can then remove or consolidate certain tests.
You can also apply fundamental test design principles to do identify redundant tests. We had one client that, after taking our Test Engineering Foundation course, applied the ideas in that course to reduce the regression test set from 800 test cases to 300 test cases. Since regression testing made up most of the test execution effort for this team, you can imagine the kind of immediate efficiency gain that occurred.

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Four Ideas for Improving Test Efficiency