Exploring expectations about risk-based Testing: Towards increasing effectiveness and efficiency

• Michael Felderer
• Rudolf Ramler

• P. Abrahamsson
• A. Jedlitschka
• A. Nguyen Duc
• M. Felderer
• S. Amasaki
• T. Mikkonen

Risk-based testing is sometimes reduced to an approach that focuses on cutting costs and time in testing. While the high effort involved in testing makes efficiency an important issue, for many companies the main concern is still to find the critical defects in their software products. Such defects can cause costly remedial upgrades and fixes, and they threaten the company’s long-term business success. In this paper we explore how the two goals “effectiveness” and “efficiency” motivate a risk-based testing approach in different organiza-tions. Furthermore, we identify a third goal, summarized as “management sup-port”. In a survey conducted as part of a tutorial on risk-based testing we inves-tigated common expectations and potential benefits associated with these three goals. The results indicate that the main motivation for a risk-based approach is making testing more efficient. Nevertheless, efficiency and effectiveness are not conflicting goals and the main challenge is therefore finding strategies that in-crease the overall benefit of including risk information in testing.