Steps to Create a Test Plan

What exactly is a test plan, and why do you need one?

A test plan is a comprehensive document that details the test strategy, goals, resources required, schedule, and performance criteria for a particular new feature or piece of software to be tested.

Of course, the main aim is to find bugs, defects, and any other flaws that might cause the program to behave incorrectly or give the users a bad experience. A test plan, in particular, ensures your software:

It satisfies the requirements that influenced its design and production.
Responds appropriately to a variety of inputs
It meets the performance criteria you’ve set and can be used as expected.
It’s possible to install and run it in all of the intended environments.
Obtains the results you and your investors desire.

What does your test plan template include?

Each product and feature will have unique testing criteria, strategies, and requirements. Moreover, the purpose of your test will influence how you reach it. User Acceptance Testing (UAT), for example, is not the same as stress and load testing, and your strategy must be adapted to your end goal. There are a few key areas to be included in your test plan that will form the basis of your test plan document:

1. Description: What exactly are you testing?

To begin, be specific about what will and not be included in the test plan. Following a brief introduction that highlights your test plan objectives, high-level scope, and schedule, you must define what you will and will not test. This is your test potential, and it can rapidly become out of control if you don’t take the time to be particular and reply to both what you’ll test and why you’ll test it.

What tests are you going to run?
Why did you choose these?

Everyone must be on the same page when it comes to the specifications and scope. Use industry-standard or at least agreed-upon standards and definitions to define your tests and why they were (or were not) finished as a best practice. This way, there will be no doubt about what you evaluated.

2. How and by what procedures will you conduct these tests?

After that, you must clarify your testing technique in detail. As much as possible, go into depth.

What guidelines can the tests adhere to?
What metrics will you collect and at what stage will you collect them?
What number of different configurations or conditions can you test?
Do you need to verify any special conditions or procedures?

You’ll also want to know whether or not your test was successful. What are the pass/fail conditions for each test, in other phrases?

This isn’t the only criterion to keep in mind. There are a few other popular scenarios to include in your test plan, such as:

Criteria for withdrawal. When is it appropriate to stop testing a function and conclude that it is “successful” in achieving its goals?
Criteria for suspension. When do you take a break from a test? Is there a point at which you can avoid checking and start searching for solutions when you reach a certain number of errors? What are the steps for shutting it down and recording what has already been done?
Criteria for resumption How do you know when a suspended test should be resumed? What are the steps for checking and picking up what has been done?
It’s also a good idea to make a list of your assumptions and threats at this stage. To put it another way, what do you imagine will happen and what are some of the threats you’ll encounter during the test?

3. Duties: What are your expected results?

What are the test competencies that you require? This includes the data you want to obtain, how you’ll compile it into reports, and the problems and tasks you’ll hand over to the design team. Each test deliverable should be delegated to a particular individual on your team in a section on roles and responsibilities to ensure that nothing is overlooked.

Steps to Create a Test Plan

It’s critical to have a step-by-step process for designing your test plan and implementing it correctly to ensure that your research scope will not get out of hand. This is where you should begin:

1. Evaluate the product or feature under testing.

Before you can begin creating a test plan for a product or feature, you must first have full knowledge of it. Assume you’ve recently completed a website redesign and want to test it before launching it. What data are you looking for?

Consult with the designer or developer to determine the site’s range, goals, and features.
Examine the project’s documents (such as your SOW, project proposal, or even the tasks in your project management tool).
Execute a preview of the app to learn about its features, user flow, and limitations.

This step sets the stage for you to write your test plan’s description and goals, as well as start planning the tools you’ll need to finish it.

The first step in developing a successful and effective test plan is to really know your product.

2. Create the test strategies and methods you’ll need.

Afterward, you must decide on the scope of your test plan. The nature of your testing will be determined by a variety of factors other than the product or function. You must gain insight and consider the following:

Customer prerequisite: What will your users rely on the most?
Timeline and budget: How much time and money do you have to finish testing?
Specifications: What are the most critical aspects of this feature that must be tested?
Team skills: Do you have the specialist expertise necessary to finish each test?

In the case of a website redesign, we could claim that accessibility, user experience, and checkout flow are all within reach. Although stress, results, and database testing are not included in the scope of this project.

You may want to think about it in terms of traditional testing methodologies, such as:

Unit testing: It is the process of testing the slightest piece of software or a single function.
API testing: Run the application’s API through a variety of scenarios.
Integration testing: Testing several software modules or functions as a community is known as
System testing: Check the entire integrated system for compliance with its specifications.
Install testing: Run through the install/uninstall phase for your customers.
Compatibility testing: Putting the program through its paces on a variety of hardware, operating systems, and environments.
Load and stress testing: Evaluate the efficiency of your program as the workload grows.

The most important aspects of your test plan are determining what to test and record your test strategy. It’s not necessary to hurry through it. Take the time to fully understand your expectations and needs, then measure them with your testing tools.

3. Establish the test goals as well as the pass/fail criteria.

You’ll have to recognize when the test is “over” as you determine each different test you’ll run. This includes specifying the success and failure criteria for each test, as well as some of the other criteria we discussed earlier, such as exit and suspension criteria. To do so, you’ll need to figure out the device metrics you’re monitoring and what performance looks like with each one. For instance, if you were conducting a performance evaluation, you could consider the following metrics:

Response time: The amount of time it takes to submit a notification and receive a response.
Waiting period: The amount of time it takes to obtain the very first byte after sending a request.
Average load time: The time it takes to deliver each request.
Maximum response time: The amount of time it takes to complete a request
Inquiries per second: The number of inquiries that can be handled in one second.
Transactions that succeeded or failed: The total number of requests that were effective or ineffective.
Memory usage: The amount of memory taken to test the request.

You can keep checking and experimenting indefinitely. As a result, you must determine what is “good enough” to bring the program into the hands of consumers. Invest the time to fully understand your expectations and requirements, then weigh them with your testing tools.

4. Configure test environment

The outcome of your test plan will be determined by the function you’re testing as well as the context in which you’re evaluating it. You must decide what devices, application, operating system, and system configurations you can evaluate as part of the program. It’s a circumstance where being precise pays off. If you’re trying to label an operating system to use during the test plan, don’t just say the title; include the OS version as well.

5. Carry out test plan and monitor growth in your project management tool

There is a specific procedure you must implement once your test plan is made. Consider this to be the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC). The STLC, which is comparable to the Software Development Life Cycle, tends to follow each step of the project and looks anything like this:

Review of requirements/design
Planning and designing tests
Configuration of the testing environment
Execution of tests
Accounting on tests

6. Analysis and Audit

Run a periodic critical audit of the test plan by project team members to improve its quality. The following is a list of potential project team members:

Tester in-charge
Manager of Tests
Director of Production
Manager of the project

Their recommendations and feedback will aid you in creating a more comprehensive and insightful test plan.

To Sum Up

Using the tips above, you should be able to write a good test plan without having to invent everything from scratch. It’s simple to install and monitor any number of testing scenarios with TestDel. Monitor and create problems or testable tasks relevant to each test using TestDel’s customizable tracking system and business processes. For the test processes to operate through, each problem associated with a monitor has a set collection of status updates.