When testing a system, one question that always arises is, “How much of the system have we tested?” Coverage is defined as the ratio of “what has been tested” to “what there is to test.” One of the basic coverage metrics is requirements coverage-measuring the percentage of the requirements that have been tested. Unfortunately, the requirements coverage metric comes with some serious difficulties: Requirements are difficult to count; they are ideas, not physical things, and come in different formats, sizes, and quality levels. In addition, making a complete count of “what there is to test” is impossible in today’s hyper-complex systems. The imprecision of this metric makes it unreliable or even undefined and unusable. What is a test manager to do?

As a CMMI® Level 5 company, Motorola Global Software Group is heavily involved in software verification and validation activities. Shalini Aiyaroo, senior software engineer at Motorola, shows how tracking specific testing metrics can serve as key indicators of the health of testing and how these metrics can be used to improve testing. To improve your testing practices, find out how to track and measure phase screening effectiveness, fault density, and test execution productivity. Shalini Aiyaroo describes their use of Software Reliability Engineering (SRE) and fault prediction models to measure test effectiveness and take corrective actions. By performing orthogonal defect classification (ODC) and escaped defect analysis, the group has found ways to improve test coverage. CMMI® is a registered trademark of Carnegie Mellon University.

Looking for a systematic model to help improve testing practices within your team, department, or enterprise? Recently, Lee Copeland has led several, major test process assessment projects for both small and large test organizations. Whether you are chosen to lead an assessment project within your organization or just want to get better at testing, join Lee as he shares insights he has learned-beginning with the importance of using a proven assessment model. Lee discusses the pre-assessment preparation required, including reviewing documentation and choosing interview candidates, tips for interviewing using a questionnaire, analyzing the data you gather, writing an assessment report, and delivering your findings in a way that will be understood and acted upon.

When we are part of an improvement initiative such as CMMI®, Six Sigma, or Agile practices, we often focus on the technical aspects and pay little attention to the people and cultural issues. Major change produces a significant disruption of expectations whether the change is perceived as positive or negative. So, you need a defined process to help ensure that your improvement initiative achieves its goals. Jennifer Bonine presents the Organizational Change Management (OCM) process to help you manage the human aspects of implementing major, complex changes. She describes eight human risk factors that can sabotage process improvement programs. Learn from Jennifer how OCM can help you deal with people’s reactions to change and provide you with a change implementation architecture.