Chapter 3. Planning for Testing

• Want to plan a test process that complements your development process? See A Testing Process.

• Want to analyze the risks associated with verifying the required functionality? See Risk Analysis-A Tool for Testing.

• Need to develop test plans for the different levels and types of testing required for the comprehensive test process? See Planning Activities.

Testing requires considerable resources. Effective utilization of those resources requires good planning and good management. In this chapter we will focus on the technical aspects of planning and scheduling testing activities. We will look at determining what must be done on a technical level, who can do it, and when it should be done. We will suggest ways of constructing estimates, but we will not consider scheduling details.

Planning at the technical level is guided by templates that are "instantiated" as needed by developers. We will describe a hierarchy of test plans and relate them to standard templates using the IEEE test plan standard as an example. We will also discuss the incorporation of risk analysis into the test planning process.

Our basic testing process can be summed up as follows: Test early, test often, test enough. We will define a more detailed process in which there is a testing step for each development step. (Analyze. Test. Design. Test. Code. Test.) We will also explain a generic set of steps in which we define the basic tasks that are carried out at each of these development steps. We will also discuss testing from a management/allocation of resources perspective, describe the different dimensions of testing, and relate how we balance the trade-offs along these dimensions.