- Quality
- Cost control
- Time-to-market
The Purpose of RBT
Main purpose: Using risk management principles for adequate testing. First and foremost, RBT ensures clear communication about risks between stakeholders, clients, developers, and testers by providing a sufficient framework. RBT helps in defining terms and agreeing on a common language to make risks visible and actionable. RBT takes the big picture into account as it covers the needs of both the customers and the developers. It uses risks, specifically, as the input to support the activities of testing. Customers are typically more concerned about costs, visible quality, timing, and business features. Whereas, the concerns of the development team are much similar to these except that it perceives quality in a broader scope as it has to maintain and evolve with the product being developed. Factors such as costs and time need effective management to avoid delays and be on a budget; however, quality must not be compromised and to meet cost/timing criteria, leverage RBT to ensure focus on issues/features that customers are most concerned about.5 Major Benefits
- More focus on the customer
- Enables thorough testing of most concerned areas
- Deliver what’s most important
- Minimized impact and probability of negative risks
- Focusses testing on higher, negative risks
- Lowers the probability of missing important defects
- Reduces the impact of the risks
- Increased confidence
- Helps find more important risks first by focusing on higher risks
- Ensures exhaustive testing of important items
- Helps release products with a higher level of confidence
- Optimized costs and QA efforts
- Provides certainty regarding what to test, where to start, when to stop, etc.
- Provides the means to define the testing scope
- Identifies what tests to execute and when
- Provides a way to choose tests for regression testing
- Provides some clues for selecting candidates for automation
- Better risk-based decisions
- Gives visibility of risks to make a “go/no go” decision
- Helps overcome risks that block acceptance
- Implicitly explains why certain tests were executed over the other ones
- Eases communication with other stakeholders regarding decisions
The Overall RBT Process
- Risk Identification
- Risk Analysis
- Risk Evaluation and Treatment
- Test Planning
- Test Design
- Test Execution