PM-Clinic Week 2 Summary

Topic: Prioritizing QA late in the schedule

Compiled: 10/8/2004

The situation

QA does not have enough time to do a full test pass before the unmovable release date. How do you determine what will be tested? How do you track it? It may involve things like asking development what they think changed the most or the product marketing team about the most important features from their perspective. Then whatever criteria we arrive at has to be mapped to about 1000 or so test scenarios. I'm looking for both strategy for how to approach this at a team level (who should have authority over this decision?), but also tactics for actually getting it done.

Signed, NEQNET (Not enough quality not enough time)

High level points from the discussion

• This situation is a crisis. Whatever happens, a leader must take responsibility for going back after the fact and examining how this situation could have been avoided.
• Unmovable dates are not beyond questioning. Any date is movable, it's a matter of cost. Someone should push back on the date and find out what the reasons are the date is unmovable. There may be other options. It gives everyone a leg to stand on when they ask people to work harder. Instead of saying "the date can't move" they can offer some actual reason "we have to launch before the Superbowl or our advertising budget is lost."
• Try to sacrifice features should be sacrificed before quality. Cut a whole area, instead of taking away 10% of the quality value of each piece of the project. This will hurt less in the long run.
• PM, dev and test (and possibly marketing) must negotiate on making these kinds of decisions. One may drive, but all must contribute.
• There needs to be a criteria for prioritizing features and test cases. For test cases a simple criteria is : 1) importance of the functionality to the customer/business. 2) The likelihood of problems in an area. 3) The costs of running the test cases for an area (some are nearly free (automated) others are quite expensive). Even if you think this criteria is lame, make it better - you need some kind of criteria.
• PM or whoever owns cross functional decisions should drive high level prioritization . This should focus on prioritizing customer scenarios. If you can identify which customer scenarios ("printing files", "doing simple DB searches", etc.) matter most, it's straightforward to map test cases to those customer scenarios, and prioritize them that way. (Defining good scenarios is it's own topic - someone should email me if that want to nominate it).
• If the QA team is crunched because of high level schedule issues, the whole team should pitch in to help. It's not the QA team's fault that the dev and PM team missed it's dates.
• The PM should work with the QA team to do risk analysis. What are the possible problems if all the test cases are not run? Is the unmovable date worth the risks? This should happen before the decision was made to keep the dates where they are.

Low level points from the discussion

• Review the bug database. Look for bugs fixed for this release that are high priority.
• Focus on areas, but less boundary testing (international char sets, escaping of characters, etc.) in each area. These tests often find few bugs, but take much time to run.
• Focus on component integration points. Very common for major issues to occur here.
• Consider QFE (Quick fix engineering). Allows you to stage your test coverage to compensate for the schedule. QFE is quick fix engineering, a process for rolling out release updates soon after a major release.

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