Summary

I use my risk analysis for many different purposes before, during, and after the test effort. A ranked inventory is a powerful tool for answering important questions about the test effort and the product. If you take one additional step and add a sequencing field like "Test Order," you have created a project management tool that is uniquely applicable to the test effort.

In the scheme of things, risk analysis costs very little to perform and provides a powerful project management tool for the test effort. It also ensures that everyone in the effort understands the project's scope and priorities.

Risk analysis is not a science; at this stage it is mostly an art. However, by using MITs risk analysis, you can select ranking criteria that are appropriate and pertinent to your project and use them to make your inventory a very powerful tool in your test effort. There are other benefits as well.

We discussed several benefits of conducting risk analysis in this chapter. It can be an invaluable tool for improving the test effort, but performing risk analysis has many benefits besides better testing. Other groups benefit as well from this process, particularly operations.

Risk analysis is valuable in both the plan-driven and RAD/Agile efforts. Understanding risk and being ready to deal with the outcome is independent of the development methodology. It's just good management. The case study showed how I use risk analysis and forensic data to demonstrate the value provided by testing in terms of the money saved by testing.

In this chapter, I described a formal approach to establishing risk and prioritizing the items on the test inventory, MITs risk analysis, which uses both quantitative and qualitative analysis to establish a numeric value for risk, based on a number of specific criteria. In the early planning phases of a test effort, this analysis is used to focus test resources on the most important parts of the project and to size the test effort.

Once the risk analysis has been completed and tests have been identified, MITs risk analysis is used as the basis for determining the test coverage that should be given to an item, as you will see in Chapter 10, "Applied Risk Analysis."