Testing in a Change Control Process

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Anyone have any experience with Change Control processes and more specifically, getting testing added into it?

We have a CAB (change advisory board), where all changes big or small have to be approved before being deployed and although it is red tape and can be cumbersome, I can see some value in checking the changes make sense and it has stopped some issues.

Problem is, testing is not included in this process atall and the CIO has asked the head of change mgmt to get in touch with me because “he knows all about the testing”. There have been some changes that have gone live and caused incidents and after investigation the teams didn’t realise the impact outside of their scope.

So i have suggested that we could get a couple of additional questions added to the CAB approval form around scope of testing etc to try and get people to think about testing a bit more… Any experience of anything like this?

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Some of the tips:

  1. In CA meeting following is mandatory
    a. result of sanity test case
    b. result of regression suite

  2. Any automation test cases result with pass

  3. Open issues raised y QA and can review that they are showstopper or can go with release

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So a lot of the changes are infrastructure config changes and others, made by infrastructure teams who don’t have testers working with them. These changes are often the ones which then don’t have testing associated with them which causes problems :slight_smile:

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Ok then if possible to create any automation sanity suite which can trigger after every configuration change.
Most of the incidents found as after the changes we are not checking that they are tested or not and later on end customer o client is reporting the same.

so its always good to fail fast means to run some test and see if everything is good or not.

Other then this for every configuration change if reason for change and impact is mentioned then its easy to evaluate and can approve by CAB

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5

Sure infrastructure technicians can test too. Check the testbash talk on Subject matter experts doing testing :wink:

For automating stuff, check this one out

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Yep, part of putting the Qs into the submission form is to start the conversations and help them do their own testing, will definitely look through your talk again :slight_smile:

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I’ve been a test representative in these CAB meetings. Get yourself or someone else added to these meetings. If not, definitely get some questions onto the form like what the impact the change could have? How have the risks been mitigated?

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Yes exactly. I’ve been attending these meetings when I can but we need questions on the form too!