The One Page Test Plan

At the beginning of the week on LinkedIn I recommended the One Page Test Plan. I never imagined the amount of reaction it would get. To date it has over 600+ Likes, 52 comments, 42 reposts and over 90,000 impressions. You can check it out here — One Page Test Plan on LinkedIn.

I have to be clear that this is not something I came up with. I have been using it for a number of years and first disovered it on a Ministry of Testing article that Claire Reckless wrote.

I feel that perhaps the visual representation and the simplicity of it has got people’s attention. For me, what it helps with is “big picture thinking” before you dig into the detail. So for example, in scope or out of scope you can list the quality criteria that is applicable. To expand on that, in a recent project, my focus was not on security testing as another team was doing that, so I put security as out of scope. It really helps me focus my attention at high level before digging into the detail.

The other big advantage of this plan, is that it gives other stakeholders some insight into what you’ll be doing. I had a comment from a well know testing expert on the post and their challenge to this was that it doesn’t describe the testing. Yes it’s true. It doesn’t. Nor is that the purpose of the plan. It is a light weighted plan on a page to get the thoughts flowing. The problem I see time and again is that people tunnel vision into detail and forget the bigger picture. This one page plan is one solution you can deploy to prevent that from happening.

The last few months I have been trying to use the One Page Test Plan for a BIG project that I’m working on. I have to admit, it’s not working. It’s not a one pager anymore as there’s so much detail that needs expanding on. So this demonstrates that you have to judge your own context and use a format that fits that.