Managing the Testing Process: Practical Tools and Techniques for Managing Hardware and Software Testing

2.21. Bonus Test Planning Templates

A colleague of mine, Johanna Rothman, president of Rothman Consulting Group, has shared two of her own testing templates with me. They are included here by permission. Rothman tells me that she has her clients work through the strategy first (see Figure 2.8), and then proceed to planning (see Figure 2.9). In the case where there is more than one test subproject—for example, hardware and software subsystems that require testing before overall system testing—then there will be a single strategy document that drives the general testing strategy with a test plan for each test subproject.

Figure 2.8. Rothman's test strategy template.

Which to pick, Rothman's or mine? That's a contextual question. Based on format, I think Rothman's templates are more IEEE-like. Perhaps you don't like the IEEE template but want to use another template that is clearly compliant. You can map between the sections of Rothman's template and the IEEE template more directly than with mine. In addition, her process of having a single strategy document and a separate test plan for each test subproject is IEEE-compliant. (The two sets of documentation are called a "Master Test Plan" and a "Level Test Plan" in Software Quality Engineering's IEEE 829-based testing course, "Systematic Software Testing.") Rothman's templates call for explicit content in terms of test deliverables, ...