Turning a specification into a test plan

This book is about designing great system test plans; however, I propose that those test plans are secondary. They are an outcome of having a great feature specification.

You only need to put in the effort once to design and create a comprehensive document describing the feature. You could put that effort into creating the test plan directly, then get that reviewed by the various stakeholders. However, as we saw in the Advantages, disadvantages, and alternatives to feature specifications section, a feature specification is more valuable to many different teams. The product management team can read a specification and agree that they want those requirements. The documentation team can use it to describe and document behavior and the support team can read it to check on details to answer customer questions. The development team can use it to track the progress of their implementation, and, of course, the test team can use it to prepare the...