- Software testing and software QA seldom have a clearly defined goal to pursue. “Get those tests run as quickly as you can” is fairly typical. Just setting a clear and attainable goal for your QA team can produce distinct and measurable improvements in both the outcomes and process! Without a clear goal, the team is left to do the best they can with the tools and information they have.
- Strategy is typically either a trite term or too overly complex to understand and use. Also, a strategy is virtually useless without a clearly defined goal (see above). But, if you define strategy as “a collection of assets, advantages and actions marshaled to achieve a goal” then we have something to work with and use! A strategy isn’t a plan. A strategy describes the gap between the current state and the goal, why it is important to achieve the goal, the collection of assets and advantages available to achieve the goal and the rules of the game (will do and won’t do). A strategy can certainly have more elements but we’ve found that these certain strategy elements make a big difference in building a great QA strategy.
- Test Planning is the process of arranging the assets, advantages and actions uncovered during the strategy to achieve the goal. The most important part of a plan is the planning – not the plan! “No plan survives contact with the enemy” – Moltke the Elder – https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Helmuth_von_Moltke_the_Elder.
We have come to understand that the real value is the planning process – for two really strong reasons. Planning involves critical thinking – considering multiple courses of action, constraints and risks. We believe that this critical thinking is a key characteristic of our Test Engineers (internal ink here) and why they are very different than “testers”.
Secondly, planning involves enormous amounts of communication. Since software testing and QA are typically the very last phase in software production, it is imperative that everyone on the team know what is happening in this final phase of production so that software releases are on time to achieve the overall business goals.
