• 21 Ways to Excel at Project Management

Conducting Structured Testing

Question 16: Have you conducted structured testing?

Good Practice: You should test deliverables early. One of the fundamental lessons from delivering IT projects is that the later you leave the testing in the development cycle, the more it costs to fix.

A structured test plan should be developed and executed by people independent of the development team. Besides testing the deliverables, you should also test the overall infrastructure over which the deliverables will run. The major components in the architecture should be tested before building the final deliverables.

The test development life cycle has the following elements:

• Test plan.
• Test specification.
• Code tests.
• Validate test.
• Run tests.

Test documentation is a necessary tool for managing and maintaining the testing process. Documents produced by testers should answer the following questions:

• What to test?
• How to test?
• What are the expected results?

When end users get involved in the final stages of testing, light bulbs go on, and they often have an 'aha' moment. Unfortunately, that is often too late.

Common Mistakes

• No test plans and, therefore, no testing.
• Testing is conducted in an ad-hoc way by the development team.
• Waiting until the deliverable is deployed before testing.
• Using test time as a contingency when development is running late.

Warning Sign: Documentation or testing stages are cut to make up lost time.