Strategy – what are our risks and priorities?

If you have gotten this far, then you recognize that there is an essentially infinite number of possible tests to run. Breaking the software into features, assigning a minimal test-effort value for the feature, making a list of the full end-to-end customer journeys… all of these things make the effort manageable. The 5-minute test plan and iterating around the product seem easy, but what do we do when there is just too much to test and some very limited time? One technique we’d like to mention here is RCRCRC.

Karen N. Johnson, a friend of ours who we have worked with, proposed a mnemonic – a memory device – for regression testing. She called it RCRCRC (http://karennicolejohnson.com/2009/11/a-heuristic-for-regression-testing/). This involves coming up with test ideas with short notice. Here are the letters defined, in her words:

• Recent: New features and new areas of code are more vulnerable
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