Reflections after writing a release advice

Joep Schuurkes — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 23:00:00 GMT

Recently I had to write a release advice. My first thought was: "I have close to two decades of experience in testing. I got this!" My second thought was: "I haven't written a release advice in over ten years, how do I do this again?"

Luckily the first thought reflected reality a lot better than the second one. And after reviews by my team members, my project lead, and our manager, I'm proud of the end result. Even though in some ways the document has ended up more like a release decision, than a release advice. (More on that later.)

Lead with the actual advice

Initially I was going to start the document with a management summary, then an introduction, an overview of the testing that was done, the relevant known issues and remaining risks, then the actual release advice and finally some ideas on how to improve our testing further. Quite soon I realized that didn't make sense.

Why your Product Risk Analysis isn't

Joep Schuurkes — Sun, 23 Jun 2013 12:34:36 GMT

Ok, going to try to keep this short and ranty (rantish?).

Typical test advice is to do a Product Risk Analysis (PRA, mind the capitalisation!) and based on that you decide what to test and how thoroughly. The most common way to do a PRA is with a workshop. Put some people in a room with a lot of stickies, let them list all the risks they can think of and then have them score them. Et voilà, Product Risk Analysis is done!

But that doesn't really make sense, now does it? If someone were to give you an object and asked you "What could possibly go wrong with this?", what would you do? Gather a bunch of people with some knowledge of the object, yet no actual experience with it and do a workshop imagining things that could go wrong? That's not an Analysis (capital A!), that's a SWAG – a scientific wild ass guess.

Joep Schuurkes (Posts about test reporting)

Reflections after writing a release advice

Lead with the actual advice

Why your Product Risk Analysis isn't