IT Testing Rubric

Back in September of 2020 I created a Google sheet that I hoped would eventually make its way through the IT community and become the "go-to" testing rubric. I shared this with members of the #JumpCloud community on our IT Hour as well as our Slack Lounge. I am resurfacing this document in hopes that we can start to build upon it as a community and create something really valuable for IT admins.

Testing Schedule

The first tab you will see is the Testing Schedule tab. This sheet is pulling all the applications listed under the critical application tab, into various phases of testing. This is more of a "Dashboard" of work to help for scheduling.

From within this tab, you can assign each application to a person that is responsible for the testing, the day they will be starting the testing and when it should be completed. The sheet autocompletes the field for how many days the testing should take. You can use the Gantt section to get a visual representation of work by filling in the days the task is going to be going for.

The different phases you see on this rubric are to help with prioritizing applications to either give you more time to test by scheduling them in early phases or by weight of critical application. For instance, Crowdstrike would likely be very important. So, you would start the functional testing in phase 1 and then schedule component testing in phase 2. Other apps, like Slack, could be schedule all testing in Phase 3.

Critical Applications

This is the bulk of the sheet, and could honestly, be used by itself without the need for the first tab.

Here, you will list all the applications, current version and which department the application mostly impacts. If it's a company business application, you use the 'Company' option in the drop down.

Testing score is calculated based on the score given in each step of testing. You will rate the test as either Excellent, Acceptable, Unsatisfactory or Fail. When you complete this for each step of testing, you will receive a full Testing Score. I will admit my foolishness here. The score I calculated is purely arbitrary, there was no science behind it. I am not sure if these scores really mean much at the end of the day. If you failed Unit testing, you probably don't even get to the other phases of testing. Additionally, if you fail component testing, you might still be able to deploy the application, just knowing that some component will not function properly.

There is a section for notes, during the testing phase. Maybe the component that doesn't work is the print function. But, for DLP purposes, printing isn't allowed 🥳! That means you could probably still deploy the application, and turning the defect, into a feature! (Calm down, I am only joking 😏😂)

Anyhoo, this is my foolish attempt at creating an IT testing rubric. I would love for smarter people to take this and evolve this into the next phase. But, if there are better ways to accomplish this, I would also love to hear about it!

Until next time, stay #foolish!