Sogeti’s Business-Driven Test Management is an approach that, in collaboration with the client, aims to balance the following elements of a test process:

• Quality of Results – meeting the needs of the business 
• Risk – test effort relates to the elements of the system to be tested - focusing manpower, resources and budget on those parts of the system that are more important to the organisation
• Time – available time for testing in relation to risks covered and results to be achieved
• Cost – available costs for testing, keeping track of budgets and allocating appropriately.

The steps in a Business-Driven Test Management Approach are:

• Establishing assignment and collecting test goals – taking into account the BDTM aspects above
• Determining risk class – for test objects and characteristics
• Determining test intensity – using the risk class as the starting point to indicate test coverage
• Estimating, planning and feedback – overall budgets and timescales agreed with the client (the above steps together result in the overall test strategy)
• Allocating test design techniques – according to the test objects and test basis
• Creating test cases and test execution.

 
By following this process, the organisation is able to take the critical decision to release software on time and within budget and to meeting the quality goals of the business.