Biography

Adam Sandman was a programmer from the age of 10 and has been working in the IT industry for the past 20 years in areas such as architecture, agile development, testing, and project management. Currently, Adam is a Director of Technology at Inflectra Corporation, where he is interested in technology, business, and enabling people to follow their passions.

At Inflectra, Adam has been responsible for researching the tools, technologies, and processes in the software testing and quality assurance space. Adam has previously spoken at STAR West (2020), Agile DevOps West (2020), STPCon (2018 – 2020), Swiss Testing Day (2019 and 2020), EuroSTAR 2020, InflectraCon (2019 and 2020), TestingMind (2019 and 2020) and STAR Canada (2019).

Talk

Ready to Run the Risk? – Applying a Risk-Based Approach to Testing

One of the most underappreciated aspects of testing is risk. There is never enough time to do all the testing that would be needed for 100% coverage (this is true for automated testing and manual testing). Consequently, there is a tradeoff between spending time on different types of testing and focusing on specific features, modules, or requirements. By applying a risk-based approach to testing, you can seek to optimize these trade-offs with a data-driven methodology.

In this talk, Adam will discuss the different types of risk that you should be considering (technical, business, etc.) and how you can use the assessment of risk to create a test plan that gives you the greatest risk coverage in the time available. He will cover prioritization techniques such as business feature importance, technical code stability, test stability, user flow, and critical service mapping to determine where the risk lies in each software release and what testing should be done.

The main takeaways will be:
1. How a risk-based approach to testing gives better outcomes
2. How you can use project metrics to create a risk-adjusted test plan
3. Practical examples of tools and techniques you can use to implement the test plan

Session Keywords