Making our testing visible to others using test plans and using the ROAM board to manage risks

In the previous month I was exploring what the testing principles could be and number 5 was,

Making our testing visible to others is an objective of ours .

This is an idea that I have been exploring in my workplace. I came up with an idea to create a repository for our Feature Test Plans, so anyone across the teams can view what is going on with any of the features. As a test team leader, this helps me to see what is going on earlier. Also, it helps teams learn from other teams and we all uplift each other up to get better as a whole. I am super excited to see where this takes us on our journey.

The style we are using is the One Page Test Plan. One section that we have added is a Mitigations section. We need to know what is happening with the risk. This way we can keep track of what has been taken care of and what is still left to do.

ROAM board — A way to manage risks

In a planning session we were introduced to the ROAM board to manage risks. This stands for Resolved, Owned, Accepted and Mitigated.

Taken from the website https://blog.planview.com/managing-risks-with-roam-in-agile

Once a risk has been identified, it is assigned into one of the following categories:

Resolved: The risk is determined to not be a threat at this time. No further action is required.

Owned: The risk cannot be resolved within the meeting, so a member of the team is selected to ‘own’ the handling of that risk. This person is responsible for making sure that this risk is appropriately managed.

Accepted: The risk cannot be resolved, so it must be accepted as-is and dealt with as necessary.

Mitigated: A plan needs to be formulated to eliminate the threat of the risk.

I thought this ROAM board was super interesting. If you know me well, you know I’m probably going to forget what ROAM stands for, however, at least there is google to look it up ;-) The main thing for me, is that we are managing risks through to completion, whether that be accepted, owned by someone or mitigated in some way.