Roadmap: How to Adopt the Test Management Practice
This roadmap describes how to adopt the Test Management practice.
Main Description

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.

  1. Educate your team about the Test Management practice. Courses and presentations are available (see the Additional Information section in Test Management).
  2. Have the team review the material in this practice.
  3. 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.
  4. Identify extension points and extend this practice to reflect any important requirements and constraints in your organization.
  5. Reuse the current elements that reflect your specific environment, such as templates and examples, by attaching them to the newly proposed practice.
  6. 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.
  7. Develop an adoption plan with specific goals for each step. An iterative, incremental approach is recommended. Try to tackle the problem points identified earlier.
  8. Select a project to start applying the new practice. This pilot project should be visible and risky enough to properly adopt this practice.
  9. Evaluate your adoption based on the objectives and metrics that you defined.
  10. 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.
  11. Determine the next step in adoption.
  12. 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.