The PRISMA Approach: Practical Risk-Based Testing

PRISMA is an approach for identifying the areas that are most important to test, i.e., identifying the areas that have the highest level of business and/or technical risk. The PRISMA approach has been developed by Improve Quality Services in practice over many years. PRISMA is currently being applied in numerous projects and organizations in a wide range of domains and lifecycles including Agile development. Today, it is taught at several universities to IT students. The PRISMA approach especially supports the test professional in performing efficient product risk identification and product risk analysis while working in close co-operation with stakeholders. It also provides guidelines to define a differentiated risk-based test approach with the flexibility to address product risk in various project environments. PRISMA can yield significant savings for an organization. Practical experience has shown over the years that benefits include improved communication with stakeholders, finding more important defects and finding them earlier in the testing, and supporting more efficient testing throughout the lifecycle. All of these aspects of PRISMA are explored in this book through the step-by-step explanation of the structured and highly practical approach for risk-based testing that is the core of PRISMA. Practical Risk-Based Testing – The PRISMA Approach provides a practical, realistic and effective way to introduce and maintain a testing approach that manages product risk, provides guidance to the testing effort and supports ongoing process improvement efforts. Risk identification, risk analysis, risk mitigation and risk monitoring (with a special focus on reporting) are explored and presented in this book. Also included is a detailed description of the process that can be followed when performing a product risk assessment using the PRISMA method. The book discusses implementation issues, process variations, e.g., for Agile, relates user experiences and closes with a number of essential lessons learned while performing PRISMA in real-life on real projects.