Lesson 6: Create a risk assessment

Risk-based testing helps QA teams prioritize the testing of specific features and functions according to their importance in the overall project and the likelihood or impact of their failure.

About this task

By prioritizing testing efforts, product managers gain a realistic view of product performance against set business objectives to better ensure that the project stays on track.

In risk-based testing, you can prioritize what needs to be tested according to the risk that is associated with test plans and test cases. With risk-based testing, you can focus your resources on the test artifacts that have the highest likelihood of failure or the greatest impact if failure occurs. Ultimately, risk-based testing helps teams to mitigate risk.

During the planning process, a team member evaluates the overall risk by defining one or several risk factors. The software uses the risk factors to calculate an overall risk assessment.

Then, other team members review the original risk assessment and select a risk ranking in the My Risk section. The software then calculates a Community Risk by averaging the My Risk selections of each user.
Important: The Community Risk ranking is separate from the original Risk Assessment. When a user supplies a My Risk ranking, the calculations that contribute to the Community Risk do not affect the original Risk Assessment.

Overview of assessing risk:

Procedure

  1. Manage risk profiles for the project by creating risk profiles and new risks
  2. Create a risk assessment in the test plan
  3. Contribute to the community risk assessment

Results

Later, you can compare the risk of multiple test plans and other test artifacts that have risk assessments, such as test cases and test suites.