Over the last few months, I have had the opportunity to review a lot of paperwork for a few clients, most of it being test plans. I hate paperwork; not that paperwork, or test plans themselves, are inherently evil. It is just that in about 90% of the cases I have experienced, they are largely used as an excuse for, or at best a substitute for, doing any real work.

Now I have been tasked with creating the test plan…THE Test Plan…(Trumpets sound, the clouds part, a golden chalice descends from heaven containing a scroll upon which is written The Test Plan…you get the picture)… for a new upcoming project. And, since it is a large organization with lots of projects going on, and they like for their official documentation to have a consistent look and feel, there is a template for the test plan. Okay, no problem with that. So I go open the template to start crafting the test plan. The template…the empty structure, devoid of any meaningful input at all…is already 28 pages long. My response to this was not positive.

And to make matters worse, I really do not have much good information to put into the test plan, because, primarily, communication and collaboration among the teams is not strong right now. So I am frustrated that creating a test plan is deemed the highest priority at this point.

It is these kinds of situations that caused me, some time back, to come up with the theorem of the well formed test plan.

The amount of formatting and verbosity applied to a test plan is inversely proportional to the amount of actual good testing represented by such plan.

David

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Ideas and Ramblings, Processes.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.