3 Quality and risk

 

This chapter covers

  • How to use quality to set goals for our strategy
  • What quality is and how to define it
  • What risks are and how they impact quality
  • How to identify risks with various techniques
  • How different risks are mitigated by different testing activities

Now that we’re more familiar with our product, restful-booker-platform, the time has come to start considering our strategy. Specifically, we need to answer the following two questions:

  • What are the goals we are hoping our strategy will achieve?
  • How are we going to achieve our goals?

It’s important to clarify these two points before we begin digging into specific testing activities to ensure the work we’re doing is delivering value. Failing to do so will result in testing that, at best, will be inconsistent and, at worse, a waste of time. As the Japanese proverb puts it, “Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” We want to ensure that we have a clear goal so that we can not only begin to form a strategy but also assess the success of it. We’ve learned in previous chapters that it’s easy to pick up some testing activities and explore a product. But the key to a successful test strategy is to test with purpose and direction. So, to answer our questions, we will require the following:

  • A clear goal for our strategy, which we will achieve by identifying what quality means to our users
  • A list of opportunities to test for in the form of risks

3.1 Defining quality

3.1.1 Quality characteristics

3.1.2 Getting to know our users

3.1.3 Setting quality goals for our strategy

3.2 Identify risks to quality

3.2.1 Learning to identify risk

3.2.2 Headline game

3.2.3 Oblique testing

3.2.4 RiskStorming

3.3 A strategy’s first steps

3.3.1 Picking the right approach for testing a risk