Improving QA Management: The Strategic Edge of Risk-Based Testing

Risk-Based Testing (RBT)

Imagine you're managing the QA team for a financial app. This application has many features and modules including user authentication, fund transfers, bill payments, loan management, notifications, banking, transaction processing generating monthly financial reports, etc. Given the complexity and critical nature of the system, ensuring its reliability isn’t a simple task but a very important and complex one.

What are the ideas behind RBT?

Instead of trying to test everything with equal intensity, which is often impossible due to time and resource constraints, you focus on the areas where things are most likely to go wrong and where the impact of those failures would be the most severe for users/customers and/or businesses.

Identifying and Assessing Risks

To start, gather your team, including devs, business analysts, and product owners. Only together you can effectively brainstorm potential risks. For example, what if the user authentication fails? What if transactions are processed incorrectly (how exactly?)? What if the financial reports generate wrong data? What if the wrong amount of funds will be transferred or transferred to the wrong account? etc

Each of these risks is assessed based on two criteria – likelihood and impact. For example:

• Auth error – this has a high likelihood (for example because authentication features are often targeted by hackers or because the load on this module is always high) and a high impact (because users/businesses will be blocked from doing certain things which affect reputation, will generate company loses, users living the service, etc).
• Incorrect transaction processing – I would say moderate likelihood but very high impact, as incorrect financial transactions can lead to significant financial and reputational losses and customer distrust.
• Errors in financial reports – low likelihood but might have a high impact, on some categories of users, such as stakeholders relying on these reports for business decisions.

These are just some examples to show you the idea, you may have different apps, systems, feature, risks, and their likelihood and impact.

Prioritizing and Planning

With this assessment, you prioritize the testing efforts. Authentication and transaction processing become top priorities.

Imagine you allocate your most experienced testers to these areas. They design detailed test cases to cover various scenarios, such as failed login attempts, SQL injections, concurrent transactions, race condition tests, etc. They also work closely with developers to ensure that all features and transaction algorithms are reliable and according to the best software dev practices.

Implementing Risk-Based Testing

As the testing is in progress, you continuously monitor and adapt. For example, during a test cycle, a new bug/vulnerability is discovered in the auth module. You immediately reassess the risk and adjust your testing strategy to focus more on this area, ensuring it's thoroughly tested before the next release.

Benefits?

RBT focuses testing efforts on the most critical areas, ensuring that high-impact features are robust and reliable. This approach optimizes resource allocation, as it prioritizes testing activities based on risk, preventing using resources on low-risk features. RBT enhances overall software quality and reliability. It also improves stakeholder communication by providing clear guidance for testing priorities, builds customer trust through increased application reliability and security, and can lead to faster time-to-market by improving the efficiency of the testing process.

A Continuous Process

Risk-based testing is not a one-time activity. It's a continuous process. As the application evolves, new risks emerge. For example, when new features are added, like a mobile banking module, you repeat the risk assessment, focusing on new high-risk areas like mobile security and UI/UX.

Conclusion and Reflection

This approach ensures your testing is efficient and effective. You're not wasting resources on low-risk, low-impact areas while critical parts of the application might go untested or tested with fewer tests that can lead to some bugs slipping to production and causing mayhem. It helps in communicating with stakeholders. When they ask why certain areas received more testing effort, you can clearly explain the risk-based rationale, aligning QA efforts with business priorities.

RBT is about being smart with your resources. It's about ensuring that the areas of your application that can cause the most damage if they fail receive the most attention. In this financial application example, this meant focusing on particular features, where the stakes were highest. By using this approach, you improve your QA processes and ensure the reliability of your software, ensuring it meets both technical and business expectations. You can always combine this approach with other processes and strategies so it doesn’t mean that you only should follow blindly what I explained but you can adapt it to your realities and use its assessment not as an absolute but as a factor in your SDLC and QA management.