One of the phases of the software testing life cycle is test planning. Bad planning can result in unnecessary time consumption, whereas good planning can lead to a smooth execution phase.
When planning tests, what considerations should be made?
It’s important to keep in mind the following things while planning tests:
Evaluate the product.
- Understand the product analysis processes. What is its purpose? What does it look like to you? It is necessary to ask for this information before a product can be analyzed.
- How it becomes user-friendly is something that should be considered.
The test strategy should be designed.
- When keeping a plan in mind, it is essential to create a design test strategy.
- The Test Strategy explains how to use testing to address project and product risks.
- It contains the process that needs to be split into different levels of testing phases.
- It also points out which testing strategy should be used in which situation. Strategies can vary depending on project requirements such as regulatory requirements, risk levels, and different methodologies of software development.
Read Manual Testing Best Practices – Improve Software Quality
Define the desired outcome.
- The objectives and goals of software testing help developers build defect-free and error-free software.
Resource Planning
- Understand the application’s scope.
- We have to plan our resources and other activities based on resource planning.
- Our resource planning should show how we are going to use our resources in the testing phases.
Plan Test Environment
- It is one of the most important phases for the tester, and it is crucial to success in the testing.
- It provides all the prerequisite skills needed to perform testing on a particular software or product.
Schedule & Estimation
- The schedule and estimation are significant parts of product development. It shows how the development will go.
- The schedule tells how things will be delivered. It displays the delivery schedule for the product.
- Test Estimation is a management activity that shows how long a task will take.
- One of the most important tasks in Test Management is estimating effort.
Identify Entry and Exit Criteria
- Entry and exit criteria within the testing cycle specify when testing should begin and when it should end.
- It’s important to identify the constraints in the testing cycle.
- We need to know where to start and when to stop in product development.
Determine the test deliverables.
- Test deliverables are artifacts that are presented to the customer in the form of software projects during the development lifecycle.
- The software development lifecycle has different test deliverables.
- Determine and plan the test deliverables.
- You should provide evidence of your deliverables, which can show your efforts to be applied in the project to build quality.
Conclusion
It is one of the best steps towards gaining quality to have a pre-plan before starting with the testing phase. Your test plan should be reviewed numerous times before being sent for approval.
