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Implementation
Now that you have a strategy, you need to share it with everyone on the project. Gather everyone around the whiteboard—or, better yet, use Visio to convert the whiteboard into a slide or series of slides. Ask everyone who developed the strategy to help explain the strategy, the reasoning behind it, and your plans for implementation. Having everyone participate helps give the feeling that this wasn't one person's pipedream, and will assist in getting buy-in from the whole team. Answer questions, and be open to changing the strategy based on feedback. Someone may know of a better tool, a more appropriate technique, or a more meaningful measurement than the ones you selected in your brainstorming session.
Once everyone (or almost everyone) agrees that this is an acceptable solution to the problems, develop an implementation plan. In the plan, answer questions like these:
In what iteration will we include each new type of testing?
How will we train the team to perform testing they have never done before?
When will we install, configure, and train for each of the new tools?
Who will be responsible for managing each phase of testing and ensuring that the established measurements are used?
How do we plan to revise and update this strategy going forward?
How will we measure whether this strategy is effective?
Who is responsible for maintaining the strategy?
As you do this further thinking, you'll encounter other questions about implementation, based on your project context. Just make sure that you have the resources you need (human, hardware, and software); that you have the time and ability to train people to be effective at things that may be new to them; and that you start slow and build momentum over time.
The project discussed in this article still hasn't implemented everything in the test strategy yet. We found some changes to be more effective than others. We've evolved the strategy over time, but we still focus on incorporating a new tool or technique each iteration, or we focus on training people to be more effective at the tasks we're already performing. Because our strategy is so simple and in a format that we can easily change and update, we find it both flexible and helpful as we try to write better software.