When I wrote my book Critical Testing Processes in the early 2000s, I started with the premise that some test processes are critical, some are not. I designed this lightweight framework for test process improvement in order to focus the test team and test manager on a few test areas that they simply must do properly. This contrasts with the more expansive and complex models inherent in TPI and TMM. In addition, the Critical Testing Processes (CTP) framework eschews the prescriptive elements of TMM and TPI since it does not impose an arbitrary, staged maturity model.
What's the problem with prescriptive models? In my consulting work, I have found that businesses want to make improvements based on the business value of the improvement and the organizational pain that improvement will alleviate. A simplistic maturity rating might lead a business to make improvements in parts of the overall software process or test process that are actually less problematic or less important than other parts of the process simply because the model listed them in order.
CTP is a non-prescriptive process model. It describes the important software processes and what should happen in them, but it doesn't put them in any order of improvement. This makes CTP a very flexible model. It allows you to identify and deal with specific challenges to your test processes. It identifies various attributes of good processes, both quantitative and qualitative. It allows you to use business value and organizational pain to select the order and importance of improvements. It is also adaptable to all software development lifecycle models. |