A Testing Process

Testing Process Example

Following the set of articles relate to Testing and TMMI implementation, today I will write about an example testing process

Testing process is the set of activities that control and support the testing model, allowing to organize all roles, entries, outputs and techniques that support the process.

The testing process is the global process that any delivery will follow in the testing factory. It is resume in the following draw:

Main roles that are identified:

• Project Manager: person with the responsibility to deal the project, between other functions this person will indicate the acceptable risk tolerance, services to include in testing, level of acceptance, quality rules to apply, schedule and costs.
• Testing Team: technical team that will handle all test cases, define the test scope (in accordance with the project manager), report defects (block defects and normal defects) and generate the testing reports.
• Testing Manager: collaborates on test plan definition, in accordance to testing team and project management. Governs of testing process, testing techniques, testing reports templates and content, capacity management, availability management...
• Development Team: group of people that are building the delivery (software and/or documentation). They have to update configuration management system with the alpha/beta version and support for Blocking defects

What Blocking and Normal defects are?

• Defect is any deviation between what is expected or is documented and what is delivered
• Blocking Defect is a defect that blocks the testing services execution, and need to be solved as soon as possible in order to continue with testing activities. A response time need to be accorded in order to allow this flexible model.
• Normal Defect are all other defects, that should be fixed in next releases and they are reporting in the moment that they are detected. 

Activities description:

• 1.- Request: project manager ask to testing team or provider to test a delivery, giving the necessary input, as for example: delivery scope, delivery dates or detected risks. 
• 2.- Delivery study: testing team will study the request with the context information about this project (i.e. previous deliveries, previous testing reports, testing plan...)
• 4.- Testing Plan: with the summary made from testing team, testing management will analyse the request and formalize a proposal of services, acceptance level, quality evidences, risk mitigation... and planning the testing services and budgeting this delivery. 
• 5.- Approve: the project manager have to validate testing plan scope, budget and schedule, in accordance to their liabilities.
• 6.- Waiting for Delivery: once the test plan is accepted, the development team will announce when the delivery is ready for test. In parallel the testing team and the testing management will be working to ensure platform availability, test cases design and update and all the previous tasks that could be performed without the delivery performed.
• 7.- Testing Execution: execution of all testing services included in the scope of this delivery. In the case that the testing process is blocked due to a defect (i.e. needed libraries are not available to build, build process fails for any reason, installation process fails) a blocking defect will be register to stablish a collaboration canal between testing team and development team. 
• 8.- Block Defect Resolution: development team has to solve this kind of defects as soon as possible. New instructions, new updates in configuration management system could be done.
• 9.- Report Generation: once services are finished a report will be generated to summarized and give recommendation to the project manager or/and to the development team.
• 10.- Revision: Test Management audit and review test execution to ensure the alignment to quality policy.
• 11.- Report Submission: reports are distribute to stakeholder for their evaluation in order to decide what to do with the delivery (ask for a new delivery, accept the delivery or accept and promote to production the delivery)
• 12.- Invoicing: testing manager will invoice all finished testing deliveries at the end of marked invoicing period.

It is just an abstract, to complete the process new activities, inputs and outputs should be included, but I think it is a good starting point.

The relation between this testing process and the tmmi processes area could be summarized in this matrix (with many considerations - it is just a initial approximation):