Test plan is probably one of the most significant document for software testing projects. Test plan may contain information related to scope, environment, schedule, risk, resources, execution, reporting, automation, completion criteria etc.

Test plan is usually created by Test Manager, Test Lead or senior testers in the team. Before start preparing Test Plan, information should be captured from various stakeholders of the project. Information captured from stakeholder is usually reflected in the Test Plan.

Typically, every Test Plan contain information about following activities. Information about these activities can be gathered from various stakeholders by asking questions that are required for your Test Plan.

Scope Management Before starting Test Planning activity, scope of the test activities should be known. You should have information on what features will be tested and what will not be tested. You should also have information on what areas your team is owning? Are you taking care of all the types of testing that is required for the product including Performance, Security, globalization etc. Defining scope for your testing project is very important for the management as well. If scope is properly defined, every one will have clear understanding about what is tested and what is not.

Reference You should clearly define documents you are referring to prepare test plan. Any changes in the documents you are referring should be reflected in your plan.

Risk Management Test strategy is derived from the risk analysis. Risk will be different from one project to another and so your Test strategy. Risk associated with a desktop tax calculation software will be different from payment gateway or life support system. In your testing strategy, you need to make sure that all the potential risks are captured and managed by your testing activities. You should, along with the other stake holders define what are the potential risk in the project? What will be the impact if these risks are materialized? What is the mitigation plan for these risks and how your testing activities are making sure that these risks are managed properly.

Test Environment You should have information on what will be the environment for the testing. This information is captured from stake holders by asking them, What type of environment will be supported by product? What is the priority for these environment? For example, If product is supported on all the platform and data for user distribution says that 80 percent are on Windows, 15 percent are on Linux and 5 percent are on Mac. From this data you can make out which platform will be tested more. Information captured here will be useful for planning hardware and software requirement for your Test Lab.

Criteria Definition Criteria for Entry and Exit should be clearly defined for every activity of your testing project. You should have well defined entry/exit criteria for starting, stopping, suspending and resuming test activities. You should also have criteria defined for specifying when testing is complete.

Estimation, Scheduling and Resource Management Mostly, testing project follows development activities. So for estimation and scheduling you should have information on the development plan and milestone. Once you have information on the development plan, you can schedule your testing activities accordingly. Resources in testing projects include hardware, software and people management.

Testing Tools and Automation You should have information about what tools you are using to manage your testing activities. You should have information on the configuration management for test artifacts, test case management tool, defect tracking system, tools for automation etc. Ideally, test automation should be treated as separate project and you should have brief information here along with the link to automation plan.

Execution and Reporting In this section you should have information on how execution will be managed for the various testing activities. What kind of reports you are planning to generate from the data that you gather from test activities. This should have information on the various matrixes and how they should be interpreted.

Release Criteria This should clearly state release criteria for the product. Criteria defined here should be clear and measurable. For example instead of saying product should be stable, you can say No P1 defect should be reported for at-least two weeks, No regression defect should be present etc.

Your test plan can be prepared according to the template provided below, but it should be changed according to your context

Test Plan Template

• Introduction
• Objective
• Scope
• Related Documents
• Requirement documents
• Design documents
• Use case documents
• Any document, which is a input for this test plan
• Risk Management
• Identified Risk
• Mitigation plan
• Test Strategy and Approach
• How test strategy is managing risk?
• Which product attributes are important and how you plan to test them?
• Test Assumptions and Dependencies
• Define assumptions related to resources, environment etc.
• Define dependencies on other teams deliverables etc.
• Test Criteria
• Define entry/exit criteria for testing activities
• Estimation
• Time it would take to complete planned activities
• Information on how you reached to this estimation
• Test deliverables and Milestones
• Break down of testing deliverables
• Information on the mile stones you are planning
• Resource requirement
• Hardware and Network requirement
• Software requirement
• People requirement
• Test Case management
• Tools used
• Distribution and responsibility
• Execution management
• Reports generated
• Defect Logging and Tracking Process
• Tool used
• Defect life cycle
• Reports generated
• Test Automation
• Coverage objective
• Link to Test Automation Plan
• Product release criteria
• Well defined, measurable release criteria.