Test Planning - Software Testing: Testing Across the Entire Software Development Life Cycle - page 91

The Tigris Open Source Software Community is a mid-size open source
community focused on building better tools for collaborative software development.
The Tigris Community is about 10 years old. The tool building activities are
organized into projects. The Tigris project of most direct interest to this textbook's
readers is the ReadySET project. ReadySET is an open source project to produce
and maintain a library of reusable software engineering document templates. These
templates provide a ready starting point for the documents used in software develop-
ment projects.
The test plan contents described in this textbook correspond somewhat to the
ReadySET QA plan template. The test case contents described in this textbook
correspond somewhat to the ReadySET test case template. The ReadySET templates,
being open source, are available on the Tigris Web site at no charge. [22]
What you should infer from this discussion is that nobody has found a single testing
document adequate to cover all the test planning and execution requirements for all
software development situations. The textbook examples, the ReadySET templates,
and the IEEE templates are identifi ed as starting points for your organization to
develop and evolve your testing documentation. If the testing documentation has
been done correctly, the testing execution results will be the same regardless of the
documentation approach adopted. It is the thought behind the planning that makes
the difference between a successful testing project and an unsuccessful one, not the
documentation approach.
Knowing that there is no “one way” to document software testing, the obvious
question is “how do I start.” One rather low-risk, high-benefi t way is to review a
recent software development project and use its documentation to pilot a represen-
tative set of testing documentation described in this chapter. That representative set
of documentation should include a test plan and test cases for a few test executions
during each development phase. Conduct a pilot lessons-learned meeting where you
discuss both the ease and diffi culty of writing the test documentation with an eye
toward minor document structure changes that would make the task easier next time
or with a larger project. Consider also discussing which items included in the pilot
documentation did not seem to be benefi cial and could be dropped. Then, consider
discussing any documentation gaps discovered by the pilot and which items might be
added next time to fi ll those gaps.
Finally, consider doing a second pilot with a slightly larger software develop-
ment project using the revised testing documentation from the fi rst pilot lessons
learned.
Because we do not have a subscription to the IEEE templates, we decided to use
the ReadySET templates for all the case studies in this textbook.
5.6 PUTTING TEST PLANNING IN PERSPECTIVE
Inexperienced software testers tend to leap from the testing strategy directly into
test cases much like inexperienced software developers tend to leap from application