Depending on your point of view, risk is either a good or bad thing. The pessimist sees the doom and gloom of future problems, the optimist delights in the opportunity, the naive ignore risks completely. As a Test Architect, I see risk as one of my most powerful tools in driving a successful test cycle. I have a ‘virtual risk lever’ that I can pull or release depending on the situation. I can use risk to justify priorities and resource, focus attention and articulate a clear business view of our testing. So what do I mean by ‘risk’ in a software testing context?

Taking a simple definition: Risk is the possibility of an event occurring that will have an impact on the achievement of objectives. Risk is measured in terms of impact and likelihood.

To give an example, if a tightrope walker is walking along a wire one foot above the ground then, regardless of the probability, the impact of falling off is minimal. A sprained foot at worst. This could be deemed a low risk activity. If the same performer walks along a wire one thousand feet from the ground the probability of falling off essentially remains the same, but the impact of falling and receiving major injuries is far greater. In this case, broken bones and worse are a certainty. This would then be considered a high risk activity. So we can see that for the same simple activity the risk can vary depending on the situation.

So how can we use risk to drive our testing?

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Why do we test software? This may seem an obvious question: everyone has at some point experienced the frustration of error-prone, or “buggy”, software. As software becomes increasingly pervasive in modern life, simple frustrations can quickly become much more serious. Just as traditional engineering disciplines involve testing of generated artifacts to ensure fitness for purpose, safety and durability, the same requirements are true for software, even though software engineering may seem abstract to a traditional engineer.

We are a group of senior software testers working in the IBM Hursley software labs in the UK. We work on large middleware projects, across multiple testing disciplines. This is an unofficial collection of our thoughts and ideas on software testing, based around our philosophy of risk-based testing. We want to share our ideas, and expand them based on other people’s thoughts. We feel that a blog is an ideal format for this: please contribute.

Arthur, Ben, Jon, Richard and Scott