Prioritizing requirement testing

Describing how to plan and track testing tasks is beyond the scope of this book, but the specification review meeting is an excellent opportunity to prioritize the testing. All parts of the feature specification are not equal; some will be well understood and covered by the developer’s testing and used by product owners, while others will be risky and/or rely solely on the test team. As described previously, the developers can indicate which areas they are most worried about. If it’s possible to disable some parts of the feature, the product owners can tell which areas are the most important to test and release first.

Some areas of the test plan are easy to test, such as customer-facing interfaces. Others are backend systems that may require specialist knowledge or areas that need scripting or test tools to exercise. Those areas that will take the longest to set up should ideally be started first. If you have multiple people working...