Estimating can be a daunting task. I’ve seen many mistakes in the past, from people missing essential tasks in their estimates, to setting test estimates based on a percentage of the development estimate set for a project. , to the fact that people are completely guessing at the number of days / weeks / months they believe the test will be over.
An inaccurate estimate can inevitably cause problems in the project, in which insufficient time is allotted to allow full testing to be performed resulting in poor quality product being released or postponement of product delivery. Both situations make the customer dissatisfied …
It is important not to set estimates for testing based on the percentage of estimates for development because there may be situations where a new function may take only half a day to develop, but it can affect many other functions of the system after that new functionality is integrated, which means the testing process will take longer than half a day, but if you set the percentage by half for that date, you may have provided an hour test estimate …
Test estimates should be set individually, by experienced testers with adequate knowledge of what is required to test the product.
So where to start to establish an estimate?
When asked to provide an estimate of the test duration for a new project, you need to think about the bigger picture and consider the following aspects:
- List of requirements (same list of requirements that developers will use for estimation): It is important to communicate with developers and stakeholders to build knowledge of the violation. vi and system expectations. Without knowing what a scope is, it will be difficult to know what a test effort is.
- Mind Map: Draw some mind maps! This allows us to think of more scenarios and end processes that we might have missed looking at just the specs.
- Think of the different types of tests needed for the project: If the load test is required, this will add a significant amount of time to execute, which will be counted towards your estimate. For Regression Check, talk to the developers to discuss release cycles – Find out how many release phases are predicted. Towards the end of the project, the regression test will take longer than at first because the system is evolving with each iteration of releases. For UAT or Beta testing, you can ask customers to support their UAT or Beta testing to help and guide users about their testing. It is important to think about all the different test methods that are required to perform.
- Think about 3 aspects of your testing time around time; “Plan and prepare”, “do” and “manage and investigate errors”.
- “Plan and Execution”: is the amount of time you will need to learn about the system, create any test documents (test plans if required, mind maps for further study , documentation reports, etc.) and test preparation (test environment set-up, get and set up the right tools and generate / set the test data needed to actually perform the test ).
- “Execution”: is the period of time to actually test the system, test requirements, do end-to-end testing, integration testing and regression, and of course re-testing is needed.
- “Error management and investigation”: is the time it takes to actually further investigate found bugs (sometimes collaborating with developers), recording properly found bugs and then That tracking bugs.
We need to think about all these aspects when estimating time. I’ve seen people provide estimates without taking into account the time it takes to plan a test or set up test data, or think about the time it takes to record bugs or prepare bug reports for guests row.
- Use the experience: rethink past products and any estimation problems you have done, then apply the knowledge gained from those lessons to the estimate you are making. new project.
- Additional backup! It is important to add time to any unforeseen problems and re-testing may be required.
Thinking about these aspects and considering them is a great start to being able to come up with an appropriate estimate of how long a new product will be testing.
Source: https://danashby.co.uk/2012/10/22/6-area-to-consider-when-thinking-about-testing-estimations/