How to adopt this practice
Here's one possible scenario for adopting this practice. You may want to add,
change, or remove steps to design an adoption roadmap more suitable to
your environment. Hiring a consultant experienced in this area will
also speed your adoption of the practice and help avoid common pitfalls.
- Educate your team about the Test Management practice. Courses and
presentations are available (see the Additional Information section in Test Management).
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Have the team review the material in this practice.
- Perform a gap analysis between your current practices and the newly proposed
one. Focus on problem areas. Try to distinguish between real differences and
mere terminology mismatches.
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Identify extension points and extend this practice to reflect any important requirements and constraints in your
organization.
- Reuse the current elements that reflect your specific environment, such
as templates and examples, by attaching them to the newly proposed practice.
- Identify and prepare to collect the information or metrics that will tell
you how well you're adopting this practice. Make sure that the data for the
metrics is easy to collect. Highly accurate metrics that are difficult to
collect are often abandoned, thus provide no value. Coarser measurements that
are easy to collect usually provide sufficient information, and it's more
likely that they'll continue to be collected.
- Develop an adoption plan with specific goals for each step. An iterative,
incremental approach is recommended. Try to tackle the problem points identified
earlier.
- Select a project to start applying the new practice. This pilot project
should be visible and risky enough to properly adopt this practice.
- Evaluate your adoption based on the objectives and metrics that you defined.
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Make adjustments based on your evaluation. Eliminate tools or tool features that don't prove effective, and
increase practices that are efficient and improve quality.
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Determine the next step in adoption.
- Continue to extend or modify this practice to reflect how your team and
organization is performing this new process and what the next increment of
adoption should be for your team.
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