Testing is a crucial part of the Software Development Life Cycle, as it helps teams recognize and deal with the errors before a product finally reaches the end customer.
Putting down a test plan in detail can simplify the testing process and provide you with a common template for all future projects. In this article, we’ll be discussing the test plans in detail, properly explaining their importance and showing you how to create an impressive software test plan template for your company.
How Do We Define A Test Plan?
A Test plan is in the form of a comprehensive doc describing the strategy used by a team to check a software product before releasing it to the public. The plan usually outlines the general procedure used to check the software. It includes the testing objectives, the strategies, things to be delivered, and the criteria. It also provides the team with instructions regarding checking a product or feature.
Why are Test Plans so crucial?
- Test plans are important because they properly describe the Test’s scope, allowing teams to focus only on testing certain features.
- They Properly explain the tools and resources required by teams before initiating testing.
- They make transparency with company leadership or clients and provide detailed insight into the testing procedure.
- They easily understand how long testing would take and help them build a fixed schedule to mark their progress.
- They help in beautifully defining every member’s work detail.
- We need to ensure that the final software product fulfills the formal requirements and we get the expected results.
What’s the best way to write down a Software Test Plan template?
Here are the steps you need to follow while writing an efficient test plan for your company. Most top-rated software testing companies follow these steps.
Conduct Research And Check The Software
Before you build a test plan, keep a little time studying the software and conducting research on what kind of people mostly use it. This will show how the end-user interacts with the product and would help you understand the functionalities that the team needs to test. It also helps in understanding the client’s expectations and needs for the final product so that you get to include the detailed specifications in the test plan.
Build a Test Strategy
A Test strategy details all the testing motives and the means to these goals and the entire cost linked to testing.
In this step, it remains easy to recognize the testing type that best matches the product or feature planned by your team to make sure that you are checking the right components. There are many testing varieties in software development, like unit, system, and agile testing methodologies.
As every kind of testing checks various software components, they all try to recognize and address the programming loopholes before the software reaches the final user.
Clearly Explain The Objectives
In this part of your Test plan, you get to express the overall goal or testing scope of the test method that your team wishes to use. You can also recognize the software components that the team has to test to fulfill the goal.
Test plan writers talk about the features of the software intended for testing as “in scope.” Opposite that, they might talk about a particular component that a plan writer does not decide to test as “out of scope.” Your team can target testing the significant features that simplify the testing procedure by talking about the testing scope.
Mark out the Test Criteria
The test criteria serve as the standard used to check the test results. Two important methods can be used to check the standards for your Test: the suspension criteria and the exit criteria. Along with the suspension criteria, you can fix a standard for the time that your team will suspend testing. Like, if you test a video game and fix the value of the suspension criteria to 50%, your team will plan to suspend testing if half of the video game’s components fail. Your team can use exit criteria to recognize the standard for completing the test phases.
Think Of An Excellent Test Environment
The Test Environment has the hardware and the software used by teams to perform the tests. You can recognize the test equipment you’d currently get and the tools your team requires before the actual testing procedure starts for planning the test environment.
In this stage, it’s important to talk about the software with the development team to know more about it and become aware of how to test it. It would help if you spoke face to face with the software developers or engineers instead of speaking on the phone or through the mail. This confirms that you properly understand the physical needs that the software should meet for the end-user to operate it in the best way.
You can learn about setting up an excellent test environment from this blog on the HikeQA website.
How to Set Up a Good Software Testing Environment
Build A Schedule
In this segment of your test plan, you can divide the testing into individual work and measure what amount of time will be taken by team members to finish every task. While making a schedule, you must look into factors like the employee schedules, project timelines, and expected risks to confirm that you are fixing up reasonable expectations. This step has helped many top-rated software companies and their leadership teams track how far the testing proceeds, allocate important resources and keep the prices within a set budget.
Recognize the Deliverables
The test deliverables talk about the documents created by the teams before, during, and post-testing. Like, the test plan is a doc that can be written before testing and helps your team properly understand the scope of the Test and the criteria of the Test. At the time of testing, the entire team can draft up a test script and collect the test data to check the components that have been marked out in the test plan. Post testing, most teams create a doc with details of the test results for managers, clients, and stakeholders to check. In this step, you can track the data you wish to gather and compile it according to your wish.
Conclusion
A Test Plan Writer’s biggest goal is to help their team find out and address errors in the software. By constructing a test plan in detail, your team can get a 1000 times better understanding of the software parts that need to be tested and the procedure to test the features properly.
If you are planning a test template, you can contact HikeQA, and our professionals will surely guide you through the entire process. If you are well-versed in writing a Test Plan Document, you can share your precious tips with us in the comments section.
