Improving Acquisition Process Efficiency via Risk-Based Testing

Abstract

This paper proposes the idea that affordable quality assurance can be achieved by focusing testing effort based on severity of risk exposure. This implies that testing effort should be allocated based on results of a suitable risk analysis: Parts of the software that could cause high-severity mishaps should be subjected to more intensive testing to control costs of future software failures, and those that cannot should be subjected to less intensive testing to safely reduce testing cost. We explain the concept of software slicing and detail how it can be used to link risk analysis and testing. We also identify some existing software tools that can be used to do software slicing and evaluate their readiness to support the proposed process improvement.