F12 – 101: Preparing the QA Budget, Effort and Test Activities (Part 1)

Track: Leadership Perspectives for Testers

This session will be an introduction to preparing a test team budget not only from a manpower perspective but also from the perspective of testing effort estimation and forecasting. The speaker will be pulling from real-life scenarios that have covered a myriad of situations of creating or inheriting a budget for testing services. Using these experiences, the speaker will highlight good practices and successes in addition to pitfalls to avoid. How to develop a budget for both project based (large enterprise wide projects through mid-sized) and portfolio/program testing services support across the organization will be presented. In part one, the financial/accounting aspects of a budget (high-level) will be discussed and how full-time equivalents (FTEs) are truly accounted; the details of a “fully loaded” resource will be explained; and the difference between capital and operational expenditures and potential tax effects will be presented. We will also develop a resource estimation model that represents real-world situations and introduce confidence and levels/iterations of a budget/resource plan.

Session Takeaways:

  • How to prepare a QA/Testing Department Budget
  • How to create an estimation model
  • How to budget for test cycles
  • Creating test case based estimation model
  • Dealing with Agile vs. Waterfall project budgets
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Session Speaker:

Paul FratellonePaul Fratellone – Program Director Quality & Test Consulting, MindTree Consulting
In addition to a 25 year career in quality and testing, Paul Fratellone has a degree in accounting information systems from Pace University. There is a big difference between preparing a department budget as opposed to a project/portfolio testing services budget. Since 2000, he has been a Director of QA and is well-seasoned in preparing department wide budgets. As a QA manager (1990’s-2000), creating project budgets for testing services was a required skill. His hands-on real-life experiences from a QA Analyst – QA Consultant will make this a good learning experience for younger QA professionals.