Water fall to SAFE ART

Hello,

This is a blog I wrote 10 years ago when the Application development started adopting agile principles. This is now can be related to Agile release train in SAFE terminology. Major take away from my last 15 years of learning while working in Product and Application development teams is, we should be more agile in the way we think and adopt the culture of building strong teams. I learnt that being a part of high energetic teams, who own their application or product possessively, has always tasted success in terms of revenue and high rate of customer satisfaction in production support phase across the globe.

Dated: 15/05/2011

In this blog, let us look into overview of End to End Test Management in the case of Business scenario testing in the case of a telecom domain

typically large telecom operators have a need to periodically implement change requests in their applications to roll out new calling plans or change in services. In these Telecom companies, time to market is very short. So there is a need to involve multiple vendors to maintain applications. Each application may be developed and tested by different vendors. In this complex scenario, Test Management plays a vital role to monitor the project execution. Its only when we have a strong End to End Test Management plan in place, we could able to deliver the project on time with quality. And not to mention, the timelines are very short and any deviation in the planned phases or project will eventually cost delay in time to market to launch this new service or product.

Broadly we can divide this Test Management activity into below streams for a testing

1. Project Announcement:- This includes the product to be launched or service to be upgraded or launched

2. Project Scope- This typically determines number of applications impacted

in this we can further identify weather an application is Development impacted or testing impacted, there are scenarios in which some of the applications are only test impacted as that application is expected to support the new change that is being implemented in upstream development application.

Development impact eventually leads to test impact category of application

3. Identification of schedule of each development and test impacted applications and taking concurrence from each application owner to adhere to the scheduled time lines.

4. As an end to end test manager take the estimates for all impacted applications and get the estimates approved from the project sponsor to avoid any budget constraints

5. Once the Project is kicked off, track the project progress by considering all the impacted applications progress with respect to the project and mark completion of each application's development or testing . This marks the SIT completion of all applications which eventually tracks the development completion.

6. As an ETE test manager, on time completion of each application's development or testing is highly essential. any delay in this phase will lead to delays in End to End testing completion. As always there will be issues from each application as well as vendor right from requirement freezing to unit testing completion to SIT completion.

7. Tracking of progress on a periodic basis will avoid the delays in SIT completion

8. Entry criterion and exit criterion to start and stop testing is very important in this case

9. 100% SIT completion of each application is entry criterion to start Business scenario testing or ETE testing

10. Typically estimates of Business scenario testing includes considering the number of impacted applications with respect to testing and development, the more the impacted applications, the complex the project execution

11. 100% test coverage and test case pass % determines the closure of End to End to Testing

12. Test closure activities concludes the ETE of the project and subsequent release into UAT testing or Pre-production testing

So to conclude, my key take away from any part of living and learning is to remain positive and the ability to embrace the change is the way forward to sustain success.?#beingagile #SAFE #Waterfall