Sunday, May 25, 2008

Open System Thinking and Software Testing (7)

This is a continuation of the posting in the category: Open System Thinking and Software Testing. For the previous post you might check out: Open System Thinking and Software Testing (6)

For defining the items and investigation of the relations of those items to each other I'm still working on Micro Level: Test Project. (See Open System Thinking and Software Testing (1) )

As written in the first post, I think you can divide the levels in micro, meso and macro. In the postings 2 until 6 I tried to deal with the test project, micro level.

Let me now try to explain my vision how open system thinking can help with the meso level: Test Process. I will use here also several postings for.

An approach as Open System Thinking can also be used on this meso level. Here you have to pay attention at least on the following questions:
1. Are there improvements suggested by the organization related tot the test process?
2. Are there actions from the test project which results in an improvement activity?
3. Are there other processes which have impact on defining a test strategy?
4. Is there a test process improvement program started?
5. What tooling are available to start a test process improvement program ?
6. What kind of development method is used in the organization?
7. Does the test process fit the existing development program ?
8. Does the development method support the organizational procedures?
9. ...

Of course their are more question which have to be asked to fill in the quadrants of the open system model. Only this will be the start of it.

In the next topics I will perform the same steps as used in micro level to fill in the picture how Open System Thinking can be used helping gaining the overview on test process level.

Again I will perform the following steps:

  1. Define the general meanings of the categories on meso level;
  2. Identify the items per category: Goals, Technology, Culture and Structure;
  3. Fill in the quadrants;
  4. Define how the items are weakening or supporting each other;
  5. Defining the sentences how this empowering/weakening is done;
  6. Defining possible solutions how to monitor or to define new improvement suggestions
If you have some additional remarks or suggestions please leave a comment.

The next article related to this post can be found on: Open System Thinking and Software Testing (8)

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