The most important item to verify during an incident response test is whether incident response team members know their responsibilities . CISM incident management emphasizes that effective response depends on clearly defined and understood roles, responsibilities, escalation paths, and decision authority. During a real incident, confusion about who must contain, investigate, communicate, approve, or recover systems can cause delays and increase business impact. Users knowing call-tree numbers is useful, but the response team’s execution responsibilities are more central to incident handling. Cross-training is valuable for resilience, but it is secondary to each team member understanding their assigned role. Senior management endorsement is important for governance and support, but it is not what an operational test primarily validates. Incident response testing should determine whether the process works in practice, including coordination, communication, containment, escalation, and recovery. Therefore, verifying that response team members understand their responsibilities is the most important objective of the test.