Project Management for Traditional and Distance Tests Pojects (CTM #2) or (CSTP Elective)

This tutorial covers area 2 of the Test Management Body of Knowledge (TMBOK) required for the Certified Test Manager (CTM) certification. This tutorial also counts as an elective towards the requirements of the Certified Software Test Professional certification.

For cost and cities where this course might be offered, check our Public Training Schedule.To bring this course to your test team at your location, contact our Education and Professionals Services Group.

Concepts

Testing does not easily fit into the "do it and check it off" techniques of project management. If anything changes, testers must retest. If testers don't know exactly what changed, then they will want to retest everything; -so what can we do, uncheck all those "checks" and redo the schedule?

Traditional project management relies on formal documentation methods, which are both well planned and highly detailed. Today's short development cycles leave little time for planning and most of the details are dealt with as they appear. In addition, the challenges that arise in distance management are difficult to predict and require an adaptive, flexible approach to keep them on track.

This tutorial shows you how to use project management methods, tools and techniques to plan and manage your test effort, and be successful in the face of these challenges. Each topic is supported by one or more techniques, and numerous case studies are presented to illustrate events and methods.

Participants will learn:

• How and where test projects fit into the overall development project
• What benefits a project management approach adds to the test effort, for local and remote test efforts
• How traditional project management techniques can be applied to the test effort and to distance management
• People planning, motivation, and control techniques for today's team driven environments
• What metrics to use on your test dashboard to control test progress, and predict difficulties; --and, keep project management well informed every step of the way

Outline

• Foundations and Techniques
  • Effort estimation: How big is it?
    • Traditional (Planned) versus Agile efforts
    • Local versus remote (distance, off shore) efforts
• Test project planning
  • Requirements
    • Activity diagrams, Use cases
  • Risk Analysis and Reviews
    • Task identification and enumeration
• People
  • Identification of roles and responsibilities and assessing individuals' performance
  • Resource allocation (people, hardware, software, and facilities)
  • How teaming changes things in Project Management
    • Leading a team versus directing a group
  • How distance changes things
    • Schedule, reporting, and motivation tools
• Scheduling, tracking, and reporting techniques
  • Scheduling
    • Identifying Critical Path flow: GANTT/PERT charts
    • Other project management techniques
  • Project controls
    • Milestones, change management, risk mitigation
  • Financial analysis and ROI
  • Metric tracking and presentation
    • S-curves, velocity, Burn-downs
    • Bug metrics, risk mitigation
  • Using automated project management tools