No plan, no test

Goal: Understand why tests should be planned, and designed, before they are coded and executed.

I guess I am not far off when saying that most of the application testing done in our world falls under the term of exploratory testing or ad-hoc testing. That is: testing done manually by experienced persons that know the application under test and have a good understanding and feeling of how to break the thing. But this is most often exercised with no explicit design and no reproducible, shareable, and reusable scripts. In this world, we typically don't want developers to test their own code as they, consciously or unconsciously, know how to use the software and evade issues. Their mindset is how to make it (work), not how to break it.

With automated tests, it will be developers that will code them. And more often than not, it will be the same developers that do the application coding. So, they need a design of what tests to code. Tests that will cover a broad...