Test Plans Raise Quality!
How important is a test plan for your software project? Really important! Whether your projects are small or large, having a well thought out test plan can be the most important tool to improve quality for your project. Unfortunately, many companies overlook how important a test plan is to their testing process.
So what is a test plan? Roughly, it’s the strategy behind your testing. It contains a list of things to test, what not to test, who’s responsible for testing, pass and fail conditions, etc. Depending on your organization, you may want to track costs, approval pathways, deliverables, and more. In fact, there’s even an IEEE standard for test plans and documentation – IEEE 829.
For many engineers, test planning looks easy – so easy that they can track it all in their heads. But solid testing is like solid engineering, and that means having good plans up front. A good test plan tells you:
- Are you spending your time and resources testing the right things?
- What constitutes a bug?
- Which bugs are the most important to find?
- How much coverage do you need?
The payoff is even more important. With a good testing plan, you can release your product with far more confidence than you could otherwise. Consider the costs of missing out on bugs: if having a test plan makes it possible to find 10 extra bugs that you would have missed, and each of those bugs costs you $1,000 to fix after releasing your product, then you just saved $10,000!
Bugs are always embarrassing, so knowing that you’ve thought through your testing can help you be more confident about your product and sleep better at night.
“With a good testing plan, you can release your product with far more confidence than you could otherwise” – actually, a good testing plan that is actually carried out gives you confidence
and how often does that happen ?
Not often enough. I would love to see more test plans in the world.
Is it agile in that way? I mean it’s true that you must have test plan but for what? How much time in the future?
In agile we don’t invest a lot of time in writing a very detailed test plans but we do spend time planning what needs to be tested and how exactly we’re going to do it.