Test process

There are many important topics that this book can’t address. This book is only about writing excellent test plans to find a wide variety of issues in your application. It does not cover test teams or anything associated with test processes.

Test prioritization is not covered in detail here. The aim is to give you a large bank of ideas and test scenarios, from which you can decide their relative priority for your application. Judging risk and the likelihood and impact of issues will depend on your circumstances. It’s up to you to apply these ideas.

This book also doesn’t cover team organization. How many testers do you need in your company? How should they be arranged to work with the product owner and developers? How much time should they devote to the different forms of testing? It also doesn’t cover managing communication, such as how bugs should be raised and their life cycle, but it will tell you how to find those bugs.

Finally, this book doesn’t describe the release process, including how test results should be evaluated, internal usage and beta programs, and how to sign off and perform releases. Again, that depends on your product and industry. Even if you don’t decide to run all the tests here, you can deliberately choose which ones you exclude so that you have the best possible idea of the risks you are taking.

The aim, by the end of this book, is that you should be able to quickly prepare a comprehensive test plan, rapidly covering many different areas of testing relevant to your product and its features. Often in software development, the factor limiting your speed is identifying what you should do, so by understanding the main types of testing and common failures, you can develop tests faster. That lets you find more issues earlier in the development cycle, save time, speed up projects, and give your customers a better user experience.

With that said, we can now see the areas this book covers in detail.