Test Smarter & Faster with The Pareto Principle

The team at Calleo love to share our decades of testing and IT experience and have been doing this for many years via our blog Software Testing Insights .

Each month, we share the latest insights, testing news, tool updates and guides.

In this month’s edition, I explore how the 80-20 rule can be applied to many areas of software testing. Once you understand how to use it to your advantage, testing becomes so much easier.

In this edition:

1. Test Smarter & Faster with The Pareto Principle
2. 3 Unexpected Lessons Testers Can Learn from Nature
3. Test Tool Checkpoint: Latest Software Versions
4. In Next Month's Issue....

Test Smarter & Faster with The Pareto Principle

In many ways, software testing is the art of doing more with less. Efficiency is the name of the game. Testing teams are constantly pressured to mitigate critical business risks without delaying go-live and are often encouraged to abandon best practices when timings get tight. However, by adopting the Pareto principle, I will show you 6 ways you can get ahead of the game and test smarter and faster.

Testing is a potentially open-ended endeavour with many combinations and permutations.

Knowing how and where to focus your effort is a massive part of effective test management. To be a great test manager, you need an easy rule of thumb that lets you quickly assess the testing priorities for your current project.

Throughout my 3 decades in software development, nothing has been more effective than the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80-20 rule.

The 80-20 rule applies to many areas of software testing. Once you understand how to use it to your advantage, testing becomes so much easier.

What is The Pareto Principle?

Initially observed by Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, he noticed that roughly 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. This observation soon proved relevant across different domains.

It was further demonstrated by Microsoft when they noted that fixing the top 20% of the most reported bugs would eliminate 80% of the related errors and crashes in a given system.

Why The Pareto Principle is Important for Software Testing?

The 80-20 rule can be applied to many software testing situations, making it an essential concept for testers and quality assurance professionals to understand.

Of course, in an ideal world, we testers typically want to cover more than we have time or resources?. However, this isn’t possible, especially in today’s high-paced projects. Instead, we must be pragmatic and test what matters most in the available time.

You can spend a lot of time developing intricate risk-based testing plans, or you can use the Pareto principle as an effective rule of thumb and get started quickly.

Six Ways the Pareto Principle Helps You Test Smarter and Faster:

1. Efficiency and Focus: Roughly 20% of the software components are often responsible for around 80% of defects and issues. Knowing this, testers can allocate resources more efficiently and focus on the most critical parts of the software.Consider an e-commerce application where most defects have been found in the checkout and payment modules. Following the Pareto Principle, testers would focus 80% of their early testing effort on thoroughly testing these modules, expecting they might continue to be defect-prone.
2. Risk-based Testing: 20% of an application's processes will potentially carry 80% of the business risk. The Pareto Principle suggests that testers can uncover most defects by concentrating their integration testing on these high-risk processes.For example, fund transfers and account balance processes might be deemed high-risk in a banking application due to financial implications. Testers would prioritise these areas as defects would have more severe consequences than defects in less critical modules.
3. Device Testing: Testing teams are often under-resourced, having to do more with less. Add virtually unlimited mobile devices to that mix, and you have a problem. By applying the Pareto Principle, teams can optimise the allocation of resources (time, personnel, infrastructure) to yield the highest defect detection.Instead of testing an ever-growing number of devices, test teams should focus 80% of their mobile testing effort on the most critical 20% of devices, ensuring they catch the most important issues.
4. Prioritising Bug Fixes: Once defects are identified, a few major underlying bugs will likely cause issues across multiple requirements or have a higher risk impact. Development teams can use the Pareto Principle to prioritise bug fixes. As Microsoft found, addressing the top 20% of the bugs that cause 80% of the high criticality issues can significantly improve the software's reliability and user experience.Let’s say that after testing, 100 defects are found. 20 defects are causing issues in multiple processes, whereas 80 defects affect just a single process. Developers would prioritise fixing these 20 defects before addressing the remaining 80, which might be minor UI glitches or rare edge cases.
5. Test Case Optimisation: Over time, as more and more test cases get added, it's essential to identify which test cases yield the most value. The Pareto Principle can guide testers in focusing on and maintaining the most valuable test cases while reconsidering or deprioritising others.Over time, an application can accumulate thousands of test cases. Analysis shows that 20% of these test cases find 80% of defects. Testers can focus on maintaining and running these critical test cases regularly, while the less impactful ones might be run less frequently or be candidates for removal.
6. Cost Savings: By focusing on the most impactful areas, teams can reduce testing and defect mitigation costs. The cost of fixing a defect increases exponentially the later it is found, so finding and addressing critical defects early can result in substantial cost savings.Imagine that an enterprise software application is in its final phase before release. You could test every feature thoroughly and quickly rack up weeks or months of testing. Alternatively, you focus 80% of your time on the top 20% of features that historically caused most post-release customer complaints. Leaving 20% of your time to lightly test the remaining areas.

Final Thoughts

The Pareto Principle provides a quick and effective rule of thumb to ensure that you focus your resources on what will have the most impact and benefit.

It isn't about cutting corners or reducing the importance of comprehensive testing. It’s about concentrating on key areas and deploying effective and efficient effort where it is needed.

Understanding and applying the 80-20 rule will help your projects produce better products and let you maximise your available resources.

With today's rapid development cycles, the need to test smarter, better, and faster has never been more critical. By leveraging the insights of the Pareto Principle, testing teams can rise to the occasion, ensuring high-quality software and rapid development.

Take control today - Arrange a demo of the latest test tools

3 Unexpected Lessons Testers Can Learn from Nature

Nature’s beauty and complexity have always inspired poets and philosophers, and I thought software testers deserved to join that list.

Here are three small but important lessons testers can learn from the vast wisdom of the natural world.

Test Tool Checkpoint: Latest Software Versions

OpenText (previously Micro Focus) have a wide range of software to help you test faster and deeper.? Keeping track of the latest versions can be hard, but we’re here to help.? Products that have changed since last month are shown in brackets after the product name.

If you are not on the latest release, we recommend you check out what is new. It is always best to plan to upgrade at least once a year, ideally more regularly.

Below, we’ve listed the current releases of the industry-leading OpenText (Formerly Micro Focus) test tools suite:

• ALM Octane/Value Edge 16.2.1 Your ideal agile and DevOps test management tool.
• ALM/Quality Center 17.0 .1The perfect test management tool for traditional (e.g. waterfall) development methods.
• ValueEdge The solution for Value Stream Management, including solutions for strategy, test management, functional testing, performance testing, and more
• UFT One 2023 Automation tool supporting the widest range of applications.
• UFT Developer 2023 IDE-based test automation.
• UFT Digital Lab 2023 (Previously UFT Mobile)Your mobile testing toolkit includes access to labs and virtual devices.
• LoadRunner Cloud 2023.07 Rapid and efficient cloud-based performance testing.
• LoadRunner Professional 2023 R1On-premises performance testing with huge support.
• LoadRunner Enterprise 2023 R1Global performance powerhouse for large companies.
• LoadRunner Developer 2023 R1Free IDE-based performance testing.
• Service Virtualization 2023 R1 Accelerate functional and performance testing with virtual services for testing your applications (mocking services)

You can download and install the new software without further cost if you have a support contract or have bought term licences.?If you have a SaaS licence, the software will be upgraded for you.

Contact Calleo if you are out of support, and we can help you.

In our next issue....

Excel - Sabotaging Software Testing Since 1987?

Microsoft Excel is the Swiss army knife of the office world and is probably the most used software for testing – but does that make it a test tool? Next month, we look at how effective Excel is for test management and whether it does more harm than good.

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