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What Is Test Planning
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Chapter 6 - Test Planning
What Is Test Planning?
Test planning allows your team to effectively measure and manage test efforts over
the course of the project. During test planning, you identify the types of tests to
perform, the strategies for implementing and running those tests, and the resources
you will need during testing.
Test planning starts early in the development cycle, as soon as you understand the
initial set of requirements. Artifacts such as use case requirements, project schedules,
and visual models can be used as test inputs to help you determine what must be
tested. You create test cases with information contained within these inputs, and use
these throughout the test planning process as a "checklist" against which you
determine the acceptance criteria of your tests. You can also use test inputs to help
you define test configurations, attributes referring to a computer's hardware and
software. These attributes can apply to your test cases.
As with development, test planning is an iterative process. You continue to plan
testing throughout a project lifecycle, as analysts change or elaborate on
requirements, and as developers design and implement code.
Managing Risk
The recommended strategy for test planning is to focus on the riskiest areas of the
project first. For example, you can identify risks by considering:
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The consequences of not testing a specific part of an application.
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The consequences if a particular part of the application does not work correctly.
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The likelihood that an error will be discovered after the product ships.
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The ramifications if a user, rather than a project member, discovers an error in the
application.
Making a Plan and Measuring Progress
You can use all types of project artifacts to plan, design, and run tests with Rational
TestManager. You can use requirements, visual models, and source code to create a
test plan so that you can test all aspects of your system, including product features,
system architecture, and code.
The integration between Rational tools enables sharing of project assets to help you
start testing for quality early in the development lifecycle.