Risk based Testing | Product Risk and Project Risk
This article is going to be a complete guide to learn Risk Based Testing in Software testing.
- Risk can be defined as “the chance of an event, hazard, threat or situation occurring and resulting in undesirable consequences or a potential problem”
- This Testing uses risk (re-)assessments to steer all phases of the test process, i.e., test planning, test design, test implementation, test execution and test evaluation.
Threat:
A specific event that may cause and undesirable event to occur
Risk Management involves
- Assess what may go wrong
- Prioritise Risk and decide what needs to be addressed
- Implement controls to address the issues. In this lesson we will look at Project Risks and Product Risks followed by Risk-based Testing
Types of Risk
Product Risk in software testing
- Failure areas of the software or system (risk to the quality of the product)
- The risk involved in software or system, the possibility that software or system may fail to satisfy end user/consumers expectations is known as product risk
- Product Risk is also called Quality risks
Examples of Product Risks are:
- Failure prone software delivered
- Tight Schedules, that make people work in a rush and commit more mistakes.etc
- Potential that software/hardware could cause harm to an individual, company or environment
- Poor software characteristics like functionality, reliability, usability and performance
- Poor data integrity and quality for example data migration issues, data conversion problems etc
- Software that does not perform its intended functions
Testing can usually mitigate product Risks.
Project Risk in Software Testing
A risk related to management and control of the project that surround the project’s capability to deliver its objectives
We can broadly categories project risks as below
1) Organisational factors:
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- Skills, training and staff shortages
- Communication Problems
- Personnel issues
- Political issues
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2) Supplier issues
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- contractual issues
- third party Failures
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3) Technical issues:
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- Requirements not clear
- Quality of Design and Code
- Constraints
- Test environment unavailability
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Project Risk are usually managed in an Excel Sheet (or Google Docs Spreadsheet)
For each risk below information is required
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- Risk Name & Description
- Risk Index – calculated by multiplying its probability by its consequence
- Risk owner
- Date of relevance
- Prevention Actions
- Contingency Plans
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