Re-Engineering Test Management Solution To Increase Test Effectiveness

Re-Engineering Test Management Solution To Increase Test Effectiveness

by David Steven Clark

Testing is important because the existence of faults or bugs in software is unavoidable. The testers not only need to find the faults but also need to know how the particular bug occurred. The two objectives in the process of detecting fault are risk measurement and confidence building. This article is about how to increase testing effectiveness by strategizing and through certain methodologies.

Testing considerations

The test manager needs to list down the goals before beginning with the test process so that at the end of testing actual can be compared with the set objectives. Traditional software methodologies and practices are taken into account for crafting the Testing strategies for Re-Engineering program.

Testing considerations depend on the type of Re-engineering process that the organization is employing and also the type of migration.

For example let us say a product is required to be migrated to cloud for re-engineering purposes. The product will require legacy and new functional testing and would additionally require the following testing

• As it is cloud environment security testing is important
• Data migration requires Scalability testing as well
• Performance & Load testing

Test Strategizing

Test strategizing plays an essential part in the execution of the testing program. The level of business risk involved, crucial systems and huge investments makes it important to design a strategy for the testing phase. The idea way to go about would be identification of the threats and failure rate and then developing a strategy. Testing is not a one-time activity-applications need to be tested throughout their lifecycle. Every development or enhancement, upgrade or migration needs to be put thought comprehensive testing.

There are 2 types of testing strategies to be followed

Product Improvement

In product improvement no changes are made to the already existing business specifications and systems so that the old system and the re-engineered system are functionally compatible.

This kind of system would imply that the functionality remains the same from the user point of view but the re-engineering helps in improving the legacy system.

Recommended Approach

• Reverse Engineering: Having studied the system through available documentation, sources, market research, in-house development team etc., the reverse engineering process is then required to know the reason for any bug. Firstly, the process goes through the existing test plans and then analyse with the old test plans to enhance the test coverage and execute results
• Migration: As per the business requirement, old system then can be migrated to the new one
• Test Execution: After Migration, the test plans are executed and functional results are compared with the pre migration phase results

Product Enhancement: In this process, the old functionalities and old business functions are retained to implement new requirements or business functions.

Recommended Approach:

• Reverse Engineering:Having studied the system through available documentation, sources, market research, in-house development team etc., the reverse engineering process is then required to know the reason for any bug. The business requirement analysed is gathered and documented. Later depending on the functionality, the existing test plans can be used if the old functionalities are to be retained and the complete testing lifecycle is followed if the new functionalities need to be added.
• Migration: For any new requirements, the functional and non-functional test planning is to be done and old test plans need to be enhanced.
• Test Execution: The legacy system results are compared with new system to monitor the system health.

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