Estimation of testing efforts

[Archana]

How do you estimate efforts needed for testing? Any rules of thumb that you follow?

[Melvin]

One of the main factors that helps to estimate the testing effort is the knowledge of the development (from domain and software perspective). It is good for Quality Assurance engineers to participate in the new development activities since Elaboration of the requirement, understanding the scope, limitations, acceptance criteria, types of scenarios that should be included in the testing, etc. All this knowledge, and previous experience testing similar features, will help to estimate the time of testing, and even identify risk in the schedule for commercial release.

Estimates are not exact, neither fixed, it can vary depending on new discoveries or functionality extensions added during the software development cycle.

[Archana]

Thanks Melvin. That is certainly the best way to start. But once you have a fair idea about the requirements, any generic rules that you follow. Like,

For x test cases, y hours or

For a simple functionality like say login and registration, x hours? and so on?

What percentage would you have for report generation / documentation or as a buffer?

[Jari]

I would start by reading http://www.developsense.com/blog/2009/08/test-estimation-is-really-negotiation/ and http://www.developsense.com/blog/2010/10/project-estimation-and-black-swans-part-5-test-estimation/. They are good food for thought and will help you with follow-up questions in this thread.

 

[Jesper]

James Bach also had a webinar on this Topic over at the Ministry of Testing. It looked into all the factors involved in estimating testing, and identified that the most important factors are outside the control of the testers work… like: What is the defect turn around time? How testable are the requirements? What approach wrt. test automation is follow – what is the approach to testing (exploratory, v-model). Which is also my experience .. it depends 🙂

The only one that can really give you an answer to “testcases pr. hour” and “testcases pr function” is you and the context you are in. 1 hour.. 10 hours .. #YMMV

BTW: there is no notion on the scope, length, depth, details of a “test case”

[Author]

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