Building a risk mitigation team

You might be familiar with the old question, “Why didn’t testing find that bug?” It sounds innocent enough. Usually, it is in fact an assertion that testing should have found that bug. The short reason is that someone made a mistake, and people do make mistakes. For the most part, testing exists because people make mistakes. Testing mitigates, or reduces, the risk of a mistake. There are other factors; testers can think of things no one else thought of or provide other quality-related information such as a feature idea. Still, for the most part, we can think of the defects created, and the tests run as two overlapping circles. Defects that exist outside that circle need to be caught by something else, or else they will escape to the customer.

Here’s a simple exercise.

Write down on a piece of paper everything you might do to reduce risk in a project – that is, every type of activity your company runs to catch...