Time after time, project, program and line managers tried to impress me, telling they will increase the budget for testing, hoping to boost my interest and commitment as a test manager.
Hallelujah!, I thought, when this happened to me for the first time.
I felt the pressure as well as my growing set of responsibilities. Doubling a test team in the heat of the moment with only a couple of months left to deliver a massively buggy program, is not easy.
Especially when at the same time, analysts are being fired, development delays, entry criteria are used to mop the vermin floor and the deadline resides, carved in stone.
As we all know project delivery is always in fragile balance between cost, time and quality.
While delivering within time and budget constraints trying to aim at quality, in reality quality is often decreasing despite of the increased focus on testing.
How can this possibly happen?
1. Start testing too early
It's the project managers first responsibility to deliver in time and budget. To do so the test manager easily gets overruled when entry criteria are not met. Starting to test when a product is in fact not yet testable, means that you start registering defects that are probably already known and are being taken care of. Looking into known defects is a waste of development time and budget which will without exception be rewarded with decreased quality.
2. Replace analysts with testers when analysis is done
The analysts are too expensive to keep them on the project but are also most aware of the difficulties and issues. Replacing them by testers is not only cheaper, but also increases the team freshness. The real knowledge about the product and the issues walked away together with the analysts. The quality of the product inevitably decreases.
3. Make testers and client responsible for product quality
Test cases are the full responsibility of the testers. Testers get demotivated to receive answers to questions as the analysts have disappeared. As an extra security, it is often practiced that the client validates the test cases, as they are responsible to accept. This altogether easily turns into ass-covering exercise.
The issues have smaller chances to be found during testing and when they are found, they are more easily accepted.
4. CMMI Levels and TPI levels are used as silver bullets
The process is sacred. Making sure that everything is done by the book makes a project easy to manage. Following predefined processes seems to add quality. When complexity increases, it is more tempting to fall back on the known processes and procedures, avoiding failure. However, following processes without identification of anomalies, decreases product quality.
5. Use test management tools to control testing activities
Test management tools can easily contribute to 'report-driven testing'. Tests for example need to be created before execution and can not be increased or run twice because we need to be able to plan how many test cases there will be run per day per person and report against this plan. Test management tools make management give the illusion that testing is defined and measurable and tends to get micromanaged easily. This can incapacitate testers in doing their actual jobs (finding defects as soon as possible) and turn them into mindless test script executors.
