Creating, Maintaining and Using Living Test Plans (Elective)

This course covers the Elective area of the Certified Test Manager (CTM) certification, Certified Software Test Professional certification and the CSTAS certification.

For costs and cities where this course might be offered, please see the right border of this page or to bring this course to your test team at your location, contact our Education and Professionals Services Group.

Concepts

Many testers prefer to skip writing test plans because their experience has been that test plans are mainly bureaucratic busywork, tediously wasting time generating piles of paper seemingly only for its own sake.  For many others, test plans are used and consist largely of the set of executable test cases, typically written in extensive keystroke-level procedural detail, which take a long time to write, read, and revise.  In this interactive course, you’ll see how to create, maintain, and beneficially use a much different, more valuable, and less burdensome kind of test plan.  High-payback, low-overhead living test plans help you focus and refocus your test team’s limited time and resources to do more effective testing in less time, while also providing the value that overcomes traditional user, manager, and developer resistance to testing.  You’ll see how test plans help you organize your thinking so you don’t overlook or forget things and so you can update and continually rely on the test plans to guide your testing.  To enhance learning, participants practice key techniques with exercises based on real fact situations.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:  This course has been designed for testing professionals and others who manage and perform testing of software products, and also for analysts, designers, and system/project managers who need to plan productive testing as part of software development and support.

Participants will learn:

• Why test plans don’t have to be a tedious, time-consuming, paper-piling waste of effort.
• When test plans should be written for maximal value.
• How test plans fit into an overall test planning and design structure that improves test effectiveness.
• What topics a test plan should address to increase your testing success.
• Who else besides testers to involve in preparing test plans, and why they’ll be glad to participate.
• Where to analyze, prioritize, and adjust testing based upon risk.

Outline

• WHY TEST PLANS OFTEN ARE RESISTED
  • Common perceptions as useless paperwork
  • Fill-out-the-form vs. substance
  • One-time activity, never used or revisited
  • Test plans as the set of test cases
  • Busywork-intensive procedural test case
  • Fallacies of keystroke-level detail
  • Higher costs, lower value paradox
  • Actually reduces test effectiveness
  • More efficient and effective approach
  • parating content and procedure
  • Avoiding redundancy
• TEST PLANNING IN THE LIFE CYCLE
  • Reactive testing—out of time, but not tests
  • Proactive TestingÔ Life Cycle model
  • CAT-Scan ApproachÔ to find more errors
  • V-model and objectives of each test level
  • Dynamic, passive and active static testing
  • Developer vs. independent test group testing
  • Strategy—create fewer errors, catch more
  • Making the test plan a living document
  • Key sources of information updating
• TEST PLANNING STRUCTURE
  • IEEE Standard for Test Documentation
  • Gaining value, not busywork
  • Enabling manageability, reuse, selectivity
  • Identifying overlooked risks
  • Master Test Plan counterpart to project plan
  • Detailed Test Plans, minimizing repetition
• TEST PLAN TOPICS
  • Objectives, background, scope, references
  • Test items, configuration control
  • Test environment, supporting materials
  • Approach, strategy, risk analysis
  • Sequence of tests, sources of data
  • Use of automated tools and types of tests
  • Features to be tested and not to be tested
  • Entry/exit criteria, pass/fail criteria
  • Anticipating obstacles and responses
  • Test deliverables, test tasks, other tasks
  • Roles, responsibilities, staffing, training
  • Schedule, risks and contingencies, sign-offs
  • Risk-based way to define test units
  • Letting testing drive development
  • Preventing major cause of overruns
  • Maintaining the living document