Note that this post is part of a series where I am ‘live blogging’ my way through the ministry of testing’s 30 days of Agile Testing challenge.
What does my test plan look like? Well I’ll keep this simple. It looks like this at the beginning of testing a new feature.
| Test Idea |
| Initial exploration |
| Does it do thing A? |
| What about B? |
And this is what it looks like part of the way through testing:
| Test Idea |
| Initial exploration |
| Does it do thing A? |
| What about B? |
| Are there any issues with this type of interactions and inputs? |
| I wonder what happens if I X |
| Do E,F and G interact with this? |
And then as I get close to the end it looks like…well you get the picture right? The list keeps expanding as I learn more about the feature and as I think of things and try things. I don’t spend a lot of time planning up front. Instead I usually just start with what I have and then pause to plan and re-plan frequently along the way. Sometime I will take more time to plan out and think through a particular type of coverage if is really important and other times I’ll just merrily go along my way letting my interactions with the product lead me. I any case, I try to keep it as simple and lightweight as possible. The plan itself has very little end value. It is a tool to help achieve something and I like light and lean tools!
offbeattesting 
My first Test Manager, some twenty years ago, said “A tester should always be so open-minded that they will add a test to their test plan. They should never be so open-minded that they ever remove a test from their test plan.”
That philosophy helped her to deliver a 1.3 gigawatt power station, but she was able to apply that to software, too.
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There are indeed always things to add to test plans 🙂 I must say thought, that I don’t always execute everything in my plan. Sometimes I get to a point where I deliberately decide not to run through an idea in a my test plan, simply because I’ve become convinced that doing so won’t be valuable enough. As we learn new things sometimes we can realize that what we previously thought was valuable, actually isn’t.
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I always felt that what she meant by “not removing tests” was “at the request of anyone else”. I agree that if it becomes obvious that a test isn’t going to fulfil any purpose, then it is surplus to requirements and can be dropped. Indeed, I’ve done this myself in recent years. (But keep a note of it. You never know when it might come in useful somewhere else.)
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