Methodologies, Timelines & Test Types

In this clip on The Art of Modelling: Test Approaches series we look at Methodologies, Timelines & Test Types and take a step back to consider how to align the test approach to the wider delivery team. And it's this realigning of delivery methodologies and timescales positively impacts the types of testing you can, and should, be looking to achieve. 

Doing this whilst avoiding bloated regression packs through favouring design discussions within the wider delivery team to avoid being able to hit delivery timelines and avoid duplicated effort and coverage. This wider delivery team of testers including developers may have access to test oracles, and within a waterfall project these will have prescribed SDLC (software development life cycle) outcomes. 

It’s likely though you’re working between waterfall and agile, so consider how exactly the system should work and what needs to be tested. Base this on a cycle of explore, build and review.  This less prescriptive approach makes design discussion more incumbent between the teams. This can truly shift testers left, and a modelling tooling can help with this need for living documentation to help prototype changes to a SUT. 

Use it to abate unintended changes which impact the broader IT estate. For instance, move away from the historic pyramid of unit tests, system tests, system integration tests and big end-to-end tests and instead of more and larger end-to-end testing, the ambition here is to have sprint-defined outcomes. This gives boundaries which can be tracked.  

This segment is part of Art of Modelling: Test Approaches, with Curiosity Software Enterprise Solutions Architect, Rich Jordan. What does a good test approach need to consider?