Improving App Quality with Risk-based Testing
Tags: devops, webdev, programming, testing
Published: 2023-04-12 10:52:42

We live in the era where everyone is looking for ‘quick solutions’ having no patience for delay, yet no tolerance for poor quality. To address the trend of ‘quick solutions’ organizations tend towards risk-based testing to optimize the process and save immensely on time and effort. Risk-based testing evaluates the probability of the software failure with defect introduction. In short, risk-based testing can be defined as executing and managing testing based on the possibility of risk that can occur across the workflow.

Risks are unknown factors that are a result of any error that occurred/will occur across the process. These are unexpected events that may give rise to quality issues, business impact, and monetary loss. To prevent unexpected errors from occurring, it is essential to strategize risk-based testing and ensure any unforeseen risk is identified and resolved.

## **Everything to know about risk-based testing**

Risk-based testing is done to mitigate risks that may occur after a software product or project is completed and delivered to the customer. Risk-based testing helps in identifying risks that may have a negative impact on business operations, thus saving time and efforts. Such failures can lead to disruptions and losses to a business. In agile software development, since the requirements are not fully specified in the initial stages, the risk of failure of a particular feature or functionality is higher. Risk-based testing is based on the principle of prioritizing the features, functionalities, or modules to be tested.

In Agile Software Development, time is a critical factor, and it may not be possible to test every feature in the software app. Therefore, the quality assurance team must prioritize what needs to be tested. Risk-based testing is adopted when there is a constraint on time, cost, and resources.
Risk-based testing has become more important as software may be hosted on multiple platforms and in complex IT infrastructure, supporting multiple operating systems. In agile software development, the risk assessment should start much early in the product development cycle in a collaborative mode.

The Quality Assurance team has the first task of defining the risks associated with the software application. They are classified into five types:

a) **Critical risk**: This can cause problems to a feature or functionality that affects the software’s central functioning and might lead to disruptions in work.

b) **Medium risk**: Such risks may not affect the customer directly but can cause disruptions in the back end.

c) **Moderate risk**: This may not cause any disruption at the customer’s end and can be corrected easily.

d) **Marginal Risk**: Such risks can be ignored as they may not cause any problems at the front end.

Usually, four types of risks are associated with a software development project.

- **Project Risks**: Project risks include lack of proper understanding of the brief, not having sufficient knowledge acquired from clients or lack of feedback from clients. Or it can be a dependence on a third-party service.

- **Product Risks**: Product risks are relative to the functionalities of a product that has not been tested and historically has more chances of failure.

- **Technical Risks**: Technical risks are related to the infrastructure, cloud services or external support that may affect the security and performance of the app. It may include payment gateways and other services.

- **Business Risks**: These are related to certain features or functionalities that may be critical to a customer's business and are classified as high risk.

**Identifying the Risk Factors**

The first step is to identify historical factors such as the probability of testers or coders going on leave or looking at historical data to find bugs encountered earlier or a feature that is new and not tested before. This should be followed by the four types of risks to be assessed including project, product, technical, and business risks. The QA, product, coding, and testing teams may have to brainstorm at this stage to shortlist the risks.

**Dealing With Risks**
For low risks, only code changes may have to be tested, but for high-risk categories, regression testing has to be carried out. For moderate risks, code changes and partial regression testing must be done. High risks require complete regression testing. This is done to ensure that recent changes in programming code have not affected the functioning of other parts of the software. The use of third party services in apps can pose a high risk in terms of security, performance, and scalability.

**Methodologies**
Once the high-risk factors and different types of risks have been identified, the quality assurance team has to work on the methodology to be adopted to do risk-based testing. Grid-based analysis helps in classifying the risks. Usually, a 3 x 3 grid is used for such classification with the top grid showing the likely failure in functionality and its related test cases. The middle grid displays the less likely ones and the last grid the most unlikely ones.  The impact of the failure of a functionality or feature is also represented in the 3 x 3 grid in the following way: minor, visible, and interruption in the horizontal axis of the grid.

The most important tests can be positioned in the left grids with 1, 2, 3, and 4 marked against them. In this way, the risks can be sorted on the basis of the order of priority. The high priority ones can be executed first and low priority ones later or taken out of the scope of the test. The grid can be used to mark the details of testing to be carried out for each functionality or feature.

In Agile Software Development, since the risk of failure of a feature or functionality has to be tested on a continuous basis, it may be better to have a standard operating procedure (SOP) that defines the processes to be tested, the ones that require continuous or repeated testing.   Since it may not be possible to test all scenarios, risk-based testing helps in prioritizing the risks to be tested.  It helps the development team to take appropriate action to mitigate risks and plan contingencies in the event of a failure. The most frequently used features and functionalities may have to be given high priority as they might be the ones that help in revenue generation for the customer.

**Benefits of risk-based testing**

**Customer Satisfaction**: With risk-based testing, the features and functionalities that are likely to have an impact on customers are tested thoroughly to reduce the possibility of failure. It also reduces the potential negative impact of each identified risk. Even if a bug is detected at the customer end, risk-based testing ensures that such problems don’t impact the business. 

**Software Quality**: Risk-based testing ensures that software is released without any bugs and is glitch-free, which enhances the brand value of the company.

**Structured testing**: Risk-based testing is more structured and prioritized, making it easier to identify the important risks even while the project’s work is on. This helps developers and testers take preventive steps to safeguard the product from bugs or errors while the project is implemented.

In short, risk-based testing helps software companies to give better software solutions that provide better return on investment (ROI) and better ratings for the software developers.