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.
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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.
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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.
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Reuse the current elements that reflect your specific environment, such as templates and examples, by attaching
them to the newly proposed practice.
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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.
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Develop an adoption plan with specific goals for each step. An iterative, incremental approach is recommended. Try
to tackle the problem points identified earlier.
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Select a project to start applying the new practice. This pilot project should be visible and risky enough to
properly adopt this practice.
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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.
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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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