Latest Blog Entries

Home
Exterminate Your Bugs -- #4 Reduce Churn
01/29/2012

Let’s continue discussing a few more details from our seminar, "Exterminate Your Bugs to Lower Software Costs: Top 5 things you can do right now!”  

#4- Reduce Churn.  The concept here is to “Stop spinning your wheels .”   Often times, the development and testing teams start feeling the pressure of the schedule and start cutting corners.  

We’ve all been there.  Pressure from management is building.  As a developer, you committed to getting your code completed by a certain date, but it’s taking longer than you expected, so what do you do?  You start reducing the amount of unit testing that you planned.  The code will probably work anyhow, right?  Besides, it doesn’t really affect you … at least not for awhile.  

Of course, the problem now becomes a team problem.  By making that decision, you handed your problem over to the test team.  Now,...

Read More
A Risk-Based Approach to Software Testing
12/13/2011

In my recent seminar on "Exterminate Your Bugs to Lower Software Costs: Top 5 things you can do right now!,” there were some surprising results that we collected from the audience. 

I’d like to start by talking about #5- Focus Where the Risk Is. Very few of the organizations we talk with use a risk-based software testing approach. In fact, in our presentation, only 25% of the audience said they utilize some sort of risk-based software testing approach. 

As a basic starting point for software test planning, you need to assure you are testing what the system is supposed to do. We call this positive or “green light” system testing.To assure that you are completing this, almost everyone builds a requirements traceability matrix (RTM) to trace the test cases back to the system requirements. If you are not doing this, a simple spreadsheet will work just fine.

The thing is that’s where most test teams stop. In our...

Read More
Exterminate Bugs to Lower Software Costs
10/26/2011

I recently conducted a seminar at Technology First’s Taste of IT conference.  During my presentation, "Exterminate Your Bugs to Lower Software Costs: Top 5 things you can do right now!", there were some surprising results that we collected from the audience.  Let's go over the top 5 ways to exterminate your bugs as well as our findings.  (Download a copy of the presentation)

#5- Focus Where the Risk Is: Only 25% of the audience utilizes a risk-based software testing approach.  Remember, it is very difficult and expensive to thoroughly test 100% of the system.  To reduce these costs, we recommend a risk-based approach.  To identify the highest risks, you need to focus on where your business requirements and technical risk (via McCabe code complexity) intersect, and then test the heck out of it.

#4- Reduce Churn:  Now this is surprising!  Based on...

Read More