From Testing School Basics : Test Plan

Test Plan

Test plan is in high demand. Ya it should be! Test plan reflects your entire project testing schedule and approach. This article is in response to those who have demanded sample test plan.

Making Test Plan has multiple benefits

• Test Plan helps us determine the effort needed to validate the quality of the application  under test
• Help people outside the test team such as developers, business managers, customers understand the details of testing.
• Test Plan guides our thinking. It is like a rule book, which needs to be followed.
• Important aspects like test estimation, test scope, test strategy are documented in Test Plan, so it can be reviewed by Management Team and re-used for other projects.

As per IEEE 829  test plan Consists of 

Test Plan Identifiers:

S.No.	Parameter	Description
1.	Test plan identifier	Unique identifying reference.
2.	Introduction	A brief introduction about the project and to the document.
3.	Test items	A test item is a software item that is the application under test.
4.	Features to be tested	A feature that needs to tested on the testware.
5.	Features not to be tested	Identify the features and the reasons for not including as part of testing.
6.	Approach	Details about the overall approach to testing.
7.	Item pass/fail criteria	Documented whether a software item has passed or failed its test.
8.	Test deliverables	The deliverables that are delivered as part of the testing process,such as test plans, test specifications and test summary reports.
9.	Testing tasks	All tasks for planning and executing the testing.
10.	Environmental needs	Defining the environmental requirements such as hardware, software, OS, network configurations, tools required.
11.	Responsibilities	Lists the roles and responsibilities of the team members.
12.	Staffing and training needs	Captures the actual staffing requirements and any specific skills and training requirements.
13.	Schedule	States the important project delivery dates and key milestones.
14.	Risks and Mitigation	High-level project risks and assumptions and a mitigating plan for each identified risk.
15.	Approvals	Captures all approvers of the document, their titles and the sign off date.