If you develop and implement an effective test strategy, you can successfully manage software test efforts. Successful test management requires the same approach as successful project management - develop a sound strategy, keep in close touch with the situation, identify and aggressively manage the critical issues and modify the strategy as needed, based on situational feedback. The "trick" to test management is knowing the components of an effective test strategy, including feedback mechanisms, and recognising the critical issues as they surface. This course provides the essential framework for successful test management. It focuses on a number of areas - the development and management of a successful testing organisation and team, the development of an effective test strategy, an understanding of the processes of testing and the recognition of issues and their origin.

The course is instructor-led with lecture presentations being supported by practical work allowing reinforcement of learning and enhancing the understanding process.

The course is designed for test managers and software testers who intend to take up roles as test managers.

A basic knowledge of software testing. The course is generic and not based on any software or hardware platform.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

Understand the importance of management, leadership and team building.

Produce an effective and realistic test plan.

Monitor the status of testing activities and software products.

Make decisions regarding the use of metrics in the testing process.

Understand how to improve testing in a structured and incremental fashion.

Reasons for not testing

Software quality, ISO 9126

Quality control and quality assurance

Why do we test

How do we test

When to start

Economics of test and failure

When to stop

What do we test against

What do we test with

Development processes (waterfall, incremental, RAD, Spiral, Sync and Stabilise, RUP, Agile

Levels of test (unit, integration, system, acceptance)

The testing process

Test strategy

People involved in testing

The test manager

Motivation and morale

Management style

Leadership guidelines

How to obtain buy-in

Team organisation, team size

Choosing staff

Test qualifications

Master test plan

Processes and documentation

Master test planning process

Contents of a test plan

Risk analysis

Test approach

Pass and fail criteria

Suspension and resumption criteria

Test deliverables

Work breakdown structures

Estimating techniques

Probability in estimating

Test case estimation

Scheduling

Resource allocation

Progress control

Handling a late start

Test techniques (functional, structural, static and dynamic analysis)

Equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, decision tables, state-transition diagrams

Exploratory testing

Mapping test cases to requirements, coverage

Test design specification

Test case and test procedure specification

Testing without requirements.

Why automate

Cost of automation

Return on investment

Tool issues

Tool selection

Open source tools

What is a defect

Test incident reports

Defect tracking and analysis

Test effectiveness

Requirements and code coverage

Defect measurement

When to stop testing

Predicting release dates

Reporting

What metrics can do for you

Measurement issues and problems

Common metrics

Usability metrics

Maintainability, cost of finding and fixing defects

What is process assessment

Capability maturity model (CMM)

Model for test process improvement

Test maturity matrix

Checkpoints