Many people talk about risk based testing. Risk based testing sounds great on paper, but not many people have a deeper understanding of what risks are and how you use risks to come up with a risk based test approach. Now in the “What is a Risk?” video, I explained what risk is. In this video I want to talk about how we use the language of risk to formulate a risk based testing approach. I should say about 20 years ago I wrote a book with my good friend Neil Thompson titled “Risk-Based E-Business Testing”. I have to say not much has changed in the last 20 years or so. Now, in the “What is a Risk” video, I suggested this definition of a risk. A risk threatens one or more of a project's cardinal objectives and has an uncertain probability. I'm going to stick with that definition for the next few minutes.

Now, what we can say about the relationship between testing and the evidence we produce from testing and risk is that we can reduce some uncertainty. Although we can never eliminate the possibility of failure - which is obviously the case - what testing does is it reduces the uncertainty about a mode of failure. What we can say is that we believe the probability of the system failing in a certain way is reduced to some degree. It would be nice to think we could measure these things precisely, but we can't. We just have to take it on merit that testing can provide evidence that reduces people's perception of risk.

If you want to know more about the concepts I'm talking about in the glossary of terms videos, it will probably help you if you take a look at the leadership in test online class that I created a year or two ago, it covers some of the topics in more detail and obviously provides more of a structured approach to explanations of the concepts. It also gives you some idea of how to do some of the things I talk about. I hope you can take a look at it and get value out of it. The link is here: [ Ссылка ]

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