Improving Testing Integration

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Applications Delivery   Information Technology   Quality   Testing/Test Management  

I am fortunate to be able to work with a lot of different organizations and to see a lot of different project infrastructures. Inevitably, I compare the way that Company A is set up versus Company B, and find similarities and differences. Often, some of those differences are the reason why a particular organization is struggling or excelling in certain areas, and that can be the basis for the work I am doing with them.

However, one area where I rarely see any differences in approach is testing. I generally get the sense that testing is viewed as a necessary overhead--a cost center that the organization has to tolerate in order to release software--not dissimilar to the way project execution functions view finance departments.

This is clearly shortsighted--the cost of not having an effective test department is clear to any organization who released a product with one or more significant defects; it is also an expensive attitude to have. Test teams can help deliver significant value to other areas of the business, and that’s what I want to look at in this article.

Testing is not “the end of the line”
I frequently hear testing referred to as the last stop, or the final phase of a release. I understand why that perception exists--once testing has been successfully completed, the product can be approved for release--but that ignores some of the associated…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.