My history with test plans

My last position was pretty standard in terms of how testing a project went. Something like this, in a rather loose implementation of Agile methodology:

  1. Project management, Dev, and QA got together to go over a project concept and discuss what it was asking for. Usually, but not always, this would involve reviewing a BRD (“business requirements document”) or a spec. These could involve wireframes from Design, actual mock screenshots, written expectations for how a thing should work, or all or none of the above.
  2. Sometimes in the same meeting, or sometimes in a different meeting, we’d discuss the logistics of how to implement the desired functionality.
  3. Dev and QA would then task out the expected work. I am familiar with using points to scope out the size of a task, but at this particular position, we mostly just scoped tasks as “this will take me X number of hours to do”.
  4. Once we had the tasks, we’d agree who was expected to perform what, and see how long it would take us to accomplish them so we could commit to a release date. Sometimes this would take us just a single two-week sprint, maybe two depending on how long Dev would need before handing off to QA.

Now, as a member of the QA team, it’d be on me to work with the expected plan for how to test things. Usually this plan would be whatever set of tasks we’d committed to for any given sprint, and we’d take care to write out within each task what the expected work would be. These tasks would often be based on the BRD of whatever we were testing.

But for larger projects, particularly ones where we’d need to pull in external help, we’d often write out actual test cases to use for reference. The tool we most often used for this was TestRail.

Why do I mention all of this?

Partly to go into a bit of detail about my most recent experience with testing, so that I can be able to coherently describe it for later interviews. But also because I want to lay the groundwork for how I plan to do a couple of test projects against this very site.

More on that in forthcoming posts.