Importance of Test Plans

With the agile technology, it is relevant that the test plans are given equal importance, thus keeping the documents updated as and when new features, bugs are logged. The agile technology calls for a revisit to the test plans, redefining the scope and identify risks and mitigation strategies

A typical approach by a QA engineer starts with executing a readily available test plan, during regression testing. Taking the example of a cloud product/platform, a lot of changes have gone into the product, however the test plan update has not been done in parallel. This has led to some of the test plans being obsolete, and some of them need to be upgraded due to the New UI features introduced.

A waterfall model approach towards updating test plans could lead to major bugs, problems left uncaught. The best practice to follow would be as and when we verify a bug, the test plan should be updated immediately.

With a big team, it is found that different members work on different areas/features of the product, especially when the product is complex. For example, some members work on automation, feature wise, some on manual testing, and a few others on performance related issues. Keeping the test plans up to date helps the automation team too, which results in time saved and utilized to verify new features introduced for a release.

Test plan is one of the ways to help us track all the customer bugs, which in turn gets automated simultaneously, and useful for regression testing. Through automation the test results can also be stored and analyzed.

 Thus the onus of each and every member to understand the importance of a test plan is very crucial.

Benefits of a Test plan at different levels

For a new team member, helps them learn the product

For a person with little experience, helps them to analyze and upgrade the test plans if required

For an experienced member, helps to build complex scenarios, thus simulating the customer’s use cases, also re write the test plan if required to meet the needs of the changes made to the product.

Keeping the test plans up to date, is one of the key responsibilities of a good QA engineer. There is no other document proof other than a test plan for a QA.