Introduction

The scenario is as follows: You are the test manager. You made a plan and a budget for testing. Your plans were, as far as you know, reasonable and well founded. When the time to execute the tests approaches, the product is not ready, some of your testers are not available, or the budget is just cut. You can argue against these cuts and argue for more time or whatever, but that doesnt always help. You have to do what you can with a smaller budget and time frame. Resigning is no issue. You have to test the product as well as possible, and you have to make it works reasonably well after release. How to survive?

There are several approaches, using different techniques and attacking different aspects of the testing process. All of them aim at finding as many defects as possible, and as serious defects as possible, before product release. Different chapters of this paper show the idea. At the end of the paper, some ideas are given that should help to prevent the pressured scenario mentioned before.

In this paper we are talking about the higher levels of testing: integration, system and acceptance test. We assume that developers have done some basic level of testing of every program (unit testing). We also assume the programs and their designs have been reviewed in some way. Still, most of the ideas in this paper are applicable if nothing has been done before you take over as the test manager. It is, however, easier if you know some facts from earlier quality control activities such as design and code reviews and unit testing.