As I approach the half-century mark, I aspire to do all I can to ensure a vigorous mind and body for years to come.
It’s no surprise, but as I age, it becomes harder and harder to maintain “sound health.” Not too long ago as a young adult, I could be cavalier about health risks and signals. Now, though, I see myself and many contemporaries contending with various injuries and illnesses.
One’s health and fitness is not really a state, it’s a process. Aging makes it harder and harder to maintain the same level of health. Yes, right NOW I may be healthy, but that doesn’t mean I’ll remain so tomorrow, or the day after, or next week. To control what I can involves a continual, ongoing process to help:
1) Protect myself against injuries and disease—I strive to eat healthful foods and exercise regularly;
2) Detect new health risks—I regularly seek the expertise of medical professionals;
3) Respond appropriately when risks crop up—do I need to rest to help this nagging muscle twinge recover?; and lastly,
4) Actually improve my health by continually learning and making adjustments to my exercise, diet, and recovery regimen.
So, let me ask you, does this sound familiar to anything going on in your test program? Perhaps you’re grappling with some of the following:
- You face ever greater risks (in number and severity) to your program’s health
- These risks increase over time
- While in the past you may have minimized the threats, you’ve witnessed others contending with frightening security challenges
- Doing so has prompted you to confront them head on and, lastly,
- You recognize the significant effort and vigilance necessary to protect your program over time
Like health, test security is also an ongoing process. While right NOW your program may be fine, tomorrow you might discover that an entire test form is breached, spreading like wildfire across various online chat rooms and bulletin boards.
At Caveon, my colleagues and I have recognized the importance of a continual, evolving test security process to help ensure the health and vitality of our clients’ test programs. The four stages of this process are: Protect, Detect, Respond, Improve.
A program manager must ensure that her policies and procedures afford the maximum amount of protection possible. Also, she must institute methods and technologies to detect when testing improprieties occur. When those mishaps happen, an appropriate response must be launched. Once resolved, the lessons learned through the breach must be leveraged to help improve operations and prevent a similar situation from occurring again.
For myself, I have implemented a process to help enjoy sound health now, and (fingers crossed) down the road. At Caveon, we’re similarly committed to supporting a test security process for our clients to achieve the same goal–continued strong test program health for years and years to come.
