Introduction
During testing, you will encounter failures related to the execution of your tests in different forms, such
as, code defects, user errors, program malfunctions, and general problems. This guideline describes some ways to
conduct failure analysis and then to report your findings.
Failure Analysis
After you have run your tests, it is good practice to identify inputs for review of the results of the testing
effort. Some likely sources are defects that occured during the execution of test scripts, change request
metrics, and test log details.
Running test scripts results in errors of different kinds such as uncovered defects, unexpected behavior, or general
failure of the test script to run properly. When you run test scripts, one of the most important things to do is
to identify causes and effects of failure. It is important to differentiate failures in the system under test as
well as those related to the tests themselves.
Change request metrics are useful in analyzing and correcting failures in the testing. Select metrics that will
facilitate creation of incident reports from a collection of change requests. Change request metrics that you may
find useful in your failure analysis include: test coverage, priority, impact, defect trends and
density.
Finally, one of the most critical sources of your failure analysis is the test log. Start by gathering the Test
Logs output during the implementation and execution of the tests. Relevant logs might come from many sources-they might
be captured by the tools you use (both test execution and diagnostic tools), generated by custom-written routines your
team has developed, output from the Target Test Items themselves, and recorded manually be the tester. Gather all of
the available Test Log sources and examine their content. Check that all the scheduled testing executed to completion,
and that all the tests were scheduled that should have been.
Recording Your Findings
Once you have conducted your failure analysis, you may decide to formalize the results of this analysis be recording
your findings in a report. There are several factors that go into deciding whether to record your failure
analysis in a report. Some of the key factors include: level of testing formality, complexity of the
testing effort, and the need to communicate the testing results to the entire development team. In less formal
environments, it may be sufficient to record your failure analysis in the form of a change request. In this case,
it is convenient to be able to cull relevant failure analysis information of change requests and put this into a
report format.
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