Test Plan Guidlines
Fundamentals of what makes a good quality test plan
A test plan provides a detailed outline of testing for a particular project in a particular release.
Having a carefully well written test plan can help ensure a feature gets well tested at every release cycle.
There are several key parts of the Test Plan:
Testing Considerations
This is where the QA Lead identifies various conditions which makes it possible to test the functionality.
Assumptions
This is where you list the conditions that can't be known a for sure ahead of time, which you have to make assumptions. These need to be stated so that QA can evaluate whether they are reasonable.
Example Assumptions
- Database contains the correct data.
- SQL Integration Service validates the data being inserted into the database.
- Users can only setup one category for the Employee Update page.
Dependencies
Dependencies that this test plan has on external conditions.
Example Dependencies
- Nightly backup of external HTML XML Feed data
- Intranet User Authentication
Risks & Issues
Conditions that add risk to the quality of the functionality or that may impact the accuracy of the test plan.
Example Risk Points
- SQL Server Integration Service is unable to read the XML Feed
- Poorly written specs
- The business owner is not clearly defined for this project.
- The current database schema is not available.
- QA isn't aware of the technology being use to display the data on the page.
Feature Description
In several paragraphs explain in detail the feature that is being tested. Links to external spec documents and technical documents should be referenced here.
A list of project/developers should be listed here. These are the people that should get tickets of any bugs found when testing this product.
Testing Outline and Summaries
This section should list all the test cases title summary. It would be good to sort the test cases by some sort of topic.
Example Test Case Summaries
- Validate that the XML passes the XML validator test '
- Validate that the intranet page is loading after the nightly XML update '
- Validate that the intranet page loads if there are no new hires '
- Validate that the intranet page loads if there are no upcoming anniversary dates '
- Validate that if a user hasn't set a configuration, the page still loads '