A risk assessment framework for software testing

Abstract

In industry, testing has to be performed under severe pressure due to limited resources. Risk-based testing which uses risks to guide the test process is applied to allocate resources and to reduce product risks. Risk assessment, i.e., risk identification, analysis and evaluation, determines the significance of the risk values assigned to tests and therefore the quality of the overall risk-based test process. In this paper we provide a risk assessment model and its integration into an established test process. This framework is derived on the basis of best practices extracted from published risk-based testing approaches and applied to an industrial test process.