Process oriented test strategies take the methodical approach one step further by regulating the test process.
Standardized Strategy
With a standardized test strategy, tester follows official or recognized standards. For example, the IEEE 829 standard for test documentation, created by a volunteer standards committee of the non-profile Institute for Electronics and Electrical Engineers, is used by some organizations to ensure regularity and completeness of all test documents. Such standardization can help to make the test process transparent and comprehensible to developers, managers, business analysts and other non-testers. However, one must take care not to introduce excessive or obstructive levels of bureaucracy or paperwork.
Agile Strategy
One increasingly popular test strategy, the agile test strategy, has arisen from the programming side of software development. Here, tester follows lightweight processes, mostly focused on technical risk (likely bugs). A heavy emphasis is placed on automated unit testing, customer acceptance testing and being able to respond to late changes without excessive costs. These strategies are tailored for small teams on short projects with immediate access to the users. Large, long, geographically distributed, or high risk projects are likely to find that the strategy does not scale.
Automated Strategies
The topic of automated unit testing brings us to a group of test strategies that rely heavily on automation. One such strategy is an automated random test strategy, where a large amount of random input data are sent to the system. Another such strategy is an automated functional test strategy, where tester tests system functionality using repeatable scripts. Either strategy might involve an automated load, performance or reliability testing element. Very obvious, these strategies rely heavily on the ability to effectively automate most of the testing that needs to be done.
Sourced from Surveying Test Strategies: A Guide to Smart Selection and Blending by Rex Black, Testing Experience Issue 2-2008. Slight modification has been made to the original text.
