With the urgency to deliver and to work towards superior quality, which are two conflicting goals, the job of a quality and testing professionals is getting very challenging. Recently I wrote an article about how to balance this, and in this article, let’s talk about some strategies for test prioritization, which in itself a challenge on a daily basis.
Having worked on multiple complex projects and having listened to a testing professionals with diverse backgrounds there are three things that I would recommend for test prioritization on a structured basis. They are:
- Business Impact
- Risk Assessment
- Key User Journeys
Let’s look at these in detail.
Business Impact
Test scenarios that have the most business impact need to be high on the list for consideration for test execution. How to decide the business impact is in itself a complex task that needs interactions with product stakeholders, specifically with the end-users of the product and the business customers. There are no shortcuts to having those key discussions, so go ahead and schedule those discussions with key stakeholders on an ONGOING basis as the product evolves pretty quick these days. On those discussions, you will figure out the areas of business impact, and from that you can derive the test procedures that need to be prioritized.
Risk Assessment
There will always be areas in product which are not high priority from a business impact perspective but they would be high risk for failure when more and more functionality gets integrated to the product. High risk areas can be determined by constantly monitoring the history of failures so far in the product to figure out where those failures were and then prioritizing those areas for test prioritization. If you don’t have a history, for example, if you are starting new with testing, then the best people to talk to about high risk areas are the developers as they have a good sense of which areas have the potential to break as they have the innate knowledge of the implementation. While assessing risk, you should also take a look at the various pillars of software to make sure that the risks associated with each are all covered.
Key User Journeys
As a quality person, I wouldn’t skip ANY of the user journeys, but since we got to prioritize because of lack of time, we could prioritize tests related to key user journeys. Key user journeys can be obtained from the history of user behavior that’s identified by the sequence of actions that the user took to accomplish something. In web-based and mobile applications, it is pretty straight-forward, as we would readily know the transitions from the user actions from screen to screen towards an end-goal. We would even know where they drop-off and that could give some clue that they don’t like something there or their objectives are not met, which could be an input from a quality perspective.
Conclusion
By focusing on high impact, risk assessment, and key user journeys, one would be able to do test prioritization towards superior quality. There will be challenges along the way if there’s a conflict on prioritization even within these areas, but there are other factors like inputs from the customer that can resolve them and help in effectively prioritizing the test procedures. If your organisation is looking for help in test prioritization in the midst of challenging schedules, please feel free to get in touch with me. Glad to help!