For my exit criteria i want to be able to include the percentage of passes and failures that are acceptable to sign off testing e.g 80% passes therefore testing can be signed off but how do work out the percentage that is acceptable?
How to assess what percentage of testing is enough
Hi Mandeep,
Thanks for your question.
Actually assessing how much testing is enough is challenging. If those who see it easy, they may be doing it wrong. The problem is that testing never ends. In theory you can always test the system (and find bugs hopefully). However, in practice,we don’t have all the time and money to test forever. We have to stop the testing when 1) we we see it enough and 2) we run out of money.
But how do we know if our testing is enough. There are several criteria but they are all subjective and should be agreed as a team.
One common criteria is test coverage based on requirements. If your testing covers 100% of requirements, you can consider as testing is “done”. Again, please also take into account what requirements are and what testing is. In some cases, you don’t have to reach 100% test coverage, but you come to an agreed coverage percentage that you feel “good enough” (e.g: all your critical, high requirements are covered)
I also talked about test coverage here (https://asktester.com/little-known-ways-to-measure-test-coverage/)
Personally, when it comes to when to stop the testing, I often think of question like how confident you are if you release the product “now” or what risks you can accept or what risks you cannot.
Sorry I cannot give a exact percentage for your question, but hopefully you got some ideas to design your own criteria.
-Thanh