Levels of Test Planning

Levels of Test Planning

Test planning SHOULD be separated from test design.

In addition to the Master Test Plan, it is often necessary to create detailed or level-specific test plans. On a larger or more complex project, it's often worthwhile to create an Acceptance Test Plan, System Test Plan, Integration Test Plan, Unit Test Plan, and other test plans, depending on the scope of your project. Smaller projects, that is, projects with smaller scope, number of participants, and organizations, may find that they only need one test plan, which will cover all levels of test. Deciding the number and scope of test plans required should be one of the first strategy decisions made in test planning. As the complexity of a testing activity increases, the criticality of having a good Master Test Plan increases exponentially

If your test plan is too long, it may be necessary to create a number of plans of reduced scope built around subsystems or functionality.

It's important that an organization have a template for its test plans. If a template doesn't meet your particular requirements, you should feel free to customize it as necessary.

What you test is more important than how much you test.

Regression testing is retesting previously tested features to ensure that a change or bug fix has not introduced new problems.

Confirmation testing is rerunning tests that revealed a bug to ensure that the bug was fully and actually fixed.

To be most effective, test planning must start at the beginning and proceed in parallel with software development. General project information is used to develop the master test plan, while more specific software information is used to develop the detailed test plans. This approach will target testing to the most effective areas, while supporting and enhancing your development process. When fully implemented, test planning will provide a mechanism to identify improvements in all aspects of the system and development process.