Test industrialization

IT divisions can make use of 3 lines of optimization:

1. improvement of test practice efficiency and hence maturity
2. outsourcing a fraction of test workload in order to benefit from more favorable prices.
3. simplifying the assets to test in order to increase their "testability"

Solution

Although the task consisting in validating a new release within ever shorter periods of time is enormous, it can be managed by exploiting the repetitive and incremental nature of each release. Our approach is based upon:

• capitalization on testware, i.e. on test plants, test cases and anomaly patters as consolidated within a single test repository.
• source code and upgrade capitalization, as stored in the Refinetm repository code base.
• process capitalization based on an iterative execution scheme that provides frequent and systematic information feedback.

Industrialization

We have designed, developed, automated and rolled out a complete range of test processes for detailing life cycle, tools, environments, organization and associated skills.

We have run, validated, measured, optimized and rolled this test processes out in accordance with rigorous and predefined specifications.

These test specifications cover all aspects of test industrialization, i.e.:

1. productivity
2. reliability measured by the residual anomaly rate, as observed 3 months after the switch to production,
3. risk measured by the estimate risk coverage rate calibrated using historical data and based on the types of change provided by each release,
4. capacity measured by the degree of operation parallelism. This factor is decisive to reduce time-to-deploy,
5. ability to outsource all or part of the processes to a remote site with offset working hours.