Why do we need impact analysis in maintenance testing?
As an ISTQB tester, impact analysis is an important part of maintenance testing because it helps identify the potential consequences of changes made to a system and the areas affected. By performing an impact analysis, testers can evaluate the impact of changes on existing tests and identify areas of the system that need to be tested for regressions.
Furthermore, impact analysis can help testers to prioritize testing efforts and allocate resources effectively based on the areas of the system that are likely to be affected by a change.
This helps to ensure that testing efforts are focused on the most critical areas of the system, reducing the risk of defects being introduced into the system and increasing the overall quality.
Finally, performing impact analysis can help improve the system's maintainability by identifying areas that may require refactoring or improvement to make them easier to maintain in the future. By addressing these issues during maintenance testing, testers can help reduce the cost and effort required for future system maintenance.
Impact analysis is an important activity in software maintenance testing as it helps to identify the potential consequences and side effects of a change.
It also helps to identify the areas in the system that will be affected by the change and the impact on existing tests.
However, impact analysis can be challenging if the specifications and test cases need to be updated or added and if there is no bi-directional traceability between tests and the test basis. In addition, if it is weak or lacks tool support and the people involved lack domain and system knowledge, it can make impact analysis more difficult. Finally, if insufficient attention has been paid to software maintainability during development, it can also make impact analysis more challenging.