Risk Mapping: What landed where in a system map
28 Aug 2026
In this moment:
Justin Holsgrove
A while ago I made a system map - how everything interconnects together in order to give a good visual of a complex system, very useful for general consumption but I wondered lately if I could turn that itself into its own heat map, in order to focus testing in the risky areas and catch any potential sneaky problems in areas that relate, which aren't obvious.
I wanted this view but I want to send it a body of work that makes up a release, then light up those areas that had changed:
I wanted this view but I want to send it a body of work that makes up a release, then light up those areas that had changed:
- Big changes (red - focus here)
- Little changes (pink - less risk, give it an eyeball)
- Peripheral changes (yellow - the potential gotcha areas that feed into and out of the big changes)
- Test only changes (green - test projects)
- Untouched (grey/ faded - little to no risk associated)
- Database nodes light up if a schema or migration change occurred.
Clicking on any of the nodes lists out what it is and links all of the associated stories and pull requests.
In order to generate this I run a python script Claude helped to generate, I give it a PAT token so it can talk to Azure DevOps and I simply feed in a query that contains all the work merged for release X, Y or Z which gets fed back per node along with its parent story. I hope this will help stop us regression testing areas that don't need the attention and focus the attention where it matters.
Justin Holsgrove
Senior Test Engineer/ QA Manager
He/Him
🤖 Test automator, engineer and QA Manager
✒️ testtechie.co.uk -> testtechie9.wordpress.com
🙆♂️ jholsgrove.github.io
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