Testing across the IT landscape

Good testing is much more than confirmation of explicit requirements. It’s figuring out the implicit requirements, what blocks the business and what drives the business. Businesses are not driven by SDLC’s but by decisions and strategies. IT road maps are just a representation of the business strategy, an engine to build business solutions on. The is much more to the business than the software solutions and related risk mitigation.

Very often the biggest business risks are outside the project scope. When we look at it this way we see that testers and testing activities has an opportunity outside the classic project life cycle. Testing is about experimenting with a IT solution, to evaluate if it fits the business requests. IT solutions that supports the business exists in many forms, I am certain that explicit testing (*) can add value in other parts of the IT landscape.

Here is a model of an enterprise IT landscape consisting of business ideas, solution development, operations and end user devices + support. Solution delivery is boring in the sense of well-known software creation and maintenance. What if the item under test and the requirements are around network, servers, end-user devices and IT support tickets. I am certain that it’s valuable to test business cases before the project is even formally assembled.

• Getting in early: https://jlottosen.wordpress.com/2017/05/09/testing_early/ 
• Testing end user device roll-out: https://club.ministryoftesting.com/t/testing-end-user-device-roll-out/799
• Who tests for the IT support https://huddle.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/forums/topic/who-tests-for-the-it-support/ 

 

*: implicit testing in the form of critical evaluation always happen. .. similarly does checking.