What is Risk Analysis

The probability of any unwanted incident is defined as Risk. In Software Testing, risk analysis is the process of identifying the risks in applications or software that you built and prioritizing them to test. After that, the process of assigning the level of risk is done.

Why use Risk Analysis?

After knowing about the risk areas, it helps the developers and managers to mitigate the risks. When a test plan has been created, risks involved in testing the product are to be taken into consideration along with the possibility of the damage they may cause to your software along with solutions.

Possible risks that you could encounter

1- Use of new hardware 2- Use of new technology 3- Use of new automation tool 4- The sequence of code 5- Availability of test resources for the application

there are certain risks that are unavoidable:

1- The time that you allocated for testing

2- A defect leakage due to the complexity or size of the application

3- Urgency from the clients to deliver the project

4- Incomplete requirements

In such cases, you have to tackle the situation with care. Following points can be taken care of:

• Conduct Risk Assessment review meeting

• Use maximum resources to work on high-risk areas

• Create a Risk Assessment database for future use

• Identify and notice the risk magnitude indicators: high, medium, low

what are these risk magnitude indicators?

High: means the effect of the risk would be very high and non-tolerable. The company might face loss.

Medium: it is tolerable but not desirable. The company may suffer financially but there is a limited risk.

Low: it is tolerable. There lies little or no external exposure or no financial loss.

Risk Assessment

In the risk analysis process, these steps prove to be the most important one. It is said that this step is way too complex and should be tackled with the utmost care. After risk identification, assessment has to be dealt programmatically.

The perspective of Risk Assessment:

There are three perspectives of Risk Assessment:

Effect – To assess risk by Effect. In case you identify a condition, event or action and try to determine its impact.

Cause – To assess risk by Cause is opposite of by Effect. Initialize scanning the problem and reach to the point that could be the most probable reason behind that.

Likelihood – To assess risk by Likelihood is to say that there is a probability that a requirement won’t be satisfied.

How to perform Risk Analysis?

There are three steps:

1- Searching the risk

2- Analyzing the impact of each individual risk

3- Measures for the risk identified