Test Risk Assessment
Test risk assessment identifies and scores the areas of a system most likely to fail and most damaging if they do, directly informing where testing effort should concentrate. It's the analytical process underlying risk-based testing as a strategy.
A typical assessment scores each feature or component on two independent axes — likelihood of failure (recent changes, complexity, past defect history) and impact if it fails (revenue, user reach, safety, reputational damage) — with the combined score determining relative testing priority and depth.
This process is what makes an uneven allocation of testing effort a defensible, deliberate decision rather than an unexamined assumption — a two-line config change to a rarely-used admin setting and a rewrite of the payment flow don't warrant equal testing depth, and a documented risk assessment is the paper trail justifying exactly why.
