Test Effort Estimation

[Ryan Dewhurst <ryandewhurst () gmail com>]

Hi,

I was wondering how to make Test Effort Estimation more efficient on
my black box web app tests. I think this is easier to do when doing
white box tests because you have a good metric, Lines of Coce (LOC),
but in black box testing a metric might be less easy to find.

What I normally do and I expect most other people do is give an
estimation based on past experiences, but in my opinion this can be
time consuming and sometimes inaccurate. Time consuming because you
have to manually view each application to be tested to mentally
compare it. Inaccurate because I'm human and on that particular day I
might be feeling *really* motivated and under-estimate the amount of
time (effort) needed or vise-versa. This I feel can lead to inaccuracy
and wasted time.

Another approach is to try and find a metric to use, that metric could
then be quantified into man hours.

A reasonable metric (by far not perfect) I can think of when doing a
typical black box web app test (using automated tools and manual
interaction) is the amount of unique dynamic pages the application
has. This can normally and quite easily be obtained.

Let's say it takes 1 man hour to test 10 pages. (plucking these
numbers out of the air)

If an app has 100 unique pages, the Test Effort Estimation would be 10
man hours.

So my questions are:

Do you think there are better metrics to use other than number of unique pages?
Do you think there are better ways to do Test Effort Estimation on
black box web application tests?
How many man hours do you think it should typically take to test 1 unique page?

I think it is an interesting topic which hasn't been discussed much as
far as I could tell.

Ryan
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