Closedown is the phase of product development between the end of development and release to manufacture. In this phase the various software modules, which have already been unit tested, are integrated to form a product and product level functionality is tested. Closedown is a critical period of development in which product level problems are found and fixed, and often is also a period in which significant change requests are introduced to change the product functionality before final release. The management of this phase of the product development life cycle is predominately experience driven where managers try to make judgements about the best way to deploy testers and developers to achieve a release date while ensuring that the level of faults in the release is kept at an acceptable level.
This talk will look at software testing from the point of view of a software product company and introduce a simple system dynamics model of closedown that allows managers to assess the impact of varying levels of tester and developer effort on the number of faults found and fixed and on the likely impact of product change requests accepted during this period.
This talk is based on joint work largely carried out by Hardeep Sharma, Test architect for Citrix Systems (Research and Development), who has been actively engaged in developing models of test and closedown over the past 10 years.