Ideally, the test manager or test lead will be responsible however one of the members of the QA team may also be asked to write up the test plan document.
Below are 8 activities that are involved in the process of creating a test plan document:
- Product and requirements analysis – this is where you try to read and understand the business requirements document, ask any questions if there are any uncertainties, and also try to be more familiar with the functionalities of the system/product.
- Develop test strategy – this activity involves:
- Determining what is in-scope and out-of-scope of testing
- Determining the types of testing/test techniques to apply i.e. which functional and non-functional tests should be performed
- Identifying any project or product risks and potential ways to mitigate them
- Figuring out who should be carrying out tests or the type of tester that needs to be involved and when should they be starting to run tests
- Determine test objectives – Test objective is the overall goal of the test execution. This activity involves identifying all the testable features of the system (functional, performance and so on) and target or end result of those listed features
- Determining test criteria– Simply put, this involves agreeing/determining on entry (when to start test cycle), suspension (when to pause/hold off on test cycle) and exit criteria (when to complete test cycle)
- Resource planning – This involves listing/identifying all the resources that are required for successful completion of the project. These resources include human resources, as well as software and hardware resources.
- Define/plan test environment – This involves planning the number of environments that need to be created/set up, their configurations as well as what software/packages need to be installed on those environments.
- Estimation and scheduling – This is where the test manager determines the project schedule. Testing process will be broken into smaller tasks and their efforts will be estimated. The estimations will be based on number of factors including the project deadline, availability of team members (in days/hours), estimation of the project and also any contingencies that needs to be accounted for.
- Determining test deliverables – This is where the test manager determines what the outcomes of the testing are i.e. test deliverables. Usually, this is divided into 3 phases:
- Before testing – Test plan document, test specification document, and test cases
- During testing – Test scripts, Test traceability matrix and test data
- After testing – Test report, bug report and release notes
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