A webinar in partnership with QA Symphony on 28th June 2016. What is Risk? How do we use it to help us test? What are the risk of testing in certain ways? What are the risks of not testing with a technical focus and exploratory mindset?
“Risk Mitigation Using Exploratory and Technical Testing” QA Symphony Webinar - June 2016
A webinar in partnership with QASymphony on 28th June 2016. Entitled “Risk Mitigation Using Exploratory and Technical Testing”.
When we test our systems, we very often use business risk to prioritize and guide our testing. But there are so many more ways of modeling risk. If business risk is our only risk model then we ignore technology risks, and the risks that our processes themselves are adding to our project. Ignoring technical risk means that we don’t improve our technical skills to allow us to model, observe and manipulate our systems at deeper levels and we miss finding important non-obvious problems. Too often people mistakenly equate ’technical testing’ with automating because they don’t model technical risk.
The full version of this talk is available in Evil Tester Talks
A video with higher quality audio recorded version of this talk is available, in Evil Tester Talks.
Slides for the webinar
Notes about Risk, Exploratory and Technical Web Testing
I have created a pdf which has some of the main slides in it, and some text to explain some of the slides. This is a little more than a set of speaker notes, but is not a transcription.
Blurb for the Webinar on Risk, Exploratory and Technical Web Testing
When we test our systems, we very often use business risk to prioritize and guide our testing. But there are so many more ways of modeling risk. If business risk is our only risk model then we ignore technology risks, and the risks that our processes themselves are adding to our project. Ignoring technical risk means that we don’t improve our technical skills to allow us to model, observe and manipulate our systems at deeper levels and we miss finding important non-obvious problems. Too often people mistakenly equate ’technical testing’ with automating because they don’t model technical risk. In this webinar we’ll explain how to model risk and us that to push our testing further. We’ll also explain how to avoid some of the pitfalls people fall into while improving their technical testing.
- Understand what technical testing means - it doesn’t mean programming and automating
- Understand the benefits you gain from increasing your exploratory and technical testing
- What risks you are exposed to if you don’t use Technical and Exploratory Testing.
- How to model and target risk from a technical perspective
- How to make your testing more technical without impacting your project
- How can non-technical managers can help their testers develop technical skills and improve their technical testing
Final Notes
I have talked about Technical Testing and Exploratory Testing before, but I wanted to approach it from a different perspective.
‘Risk’ underpins pretty much all the work that I do, but I don’t think I’ve really talked about it before, so I wanted to explore technical testing from a perspective of ‘risk’. That will create a different set of material to support my thoughts on technical testing than the practical work I often talk about.
- What do I mean by risk?
- Risks other than business risk.
- How to identify risk?
- Using risk to improve our process:
- What risk do our tools introduce?
- What risks does our process introduce?
- Risk mitigation
- Manifestation/Detection
- What is technical risk?
- How to use this to drive my testing
- Risk as a coverage model
- Risk as a derivation model
I did not use a statistical model of risk, or attempt to quantify it numerically. I tried to explain how risk underpins the testing I conduct, and the processes I follow.
Social Media Mentions
Neil Studd provided an impressive live running commentary on twitter throughout the webinar. Thanks Neil.Thanks to @eviltester for an expert webinar! Great to hear so many questions, an important first step in identifying risk. #RiskTesting
— Neil Studd (@neilstudd) June 28, 2016
@eviltester listening to your webinar, absolutely superb stuff. Will be recommending tomorrow at work #risktesting
— Lhc (@TeamLHC) June 28, 2016
@QASymphony @eviltester no problem at all, heard a lot of webinars recently and this is the best of the bunch
— Lhc (@TeamLHC) June 28, 2016
Catching up on the #risktesting Webinar with @eviltester. re-affirming so many important points. So much to put in practice. @QASymphony
— Simon Prior (@siprior) June 29, 2016
great talk @eviltester. Well done!
— Nick Norbeck (@NickNorbeck) June 28, 2016
@Bill_Matthews @eviltester same here! #Bravo
— Lucian Adrian (@lucianadrian) June 29, 2016
Nice to see someone else thinking/talking about Upside/secondary gains in risk management #risktesting @eviltester - too few do
— Bill Matthews (@Bill_Matthews) June 29, 2016
.@jeffperkins8 kicking off another great webinar. @eviltester thanks for joining us today! #risktesting pic.twitter.com/znoFwYjQbO
— QASymphony (@QASymphony) June 28, 2016
Excited to have @eviltester join @QASymphony for a Webinar on risk mitigation w/ exploratory & technical testing pic.twitter.com/Qu37DSrfz2
— Reed Gusmus (@Reed_Gusmus) June 28, 2016
"Risk Keeps Testing In Business". A great quote for #softwaretesting from a recent @QASymphony webinar hosted by Alan Richardson @eviltester
— Reed Gusmus (@Reed_Gusmus) June 29, 2016
