Test Activities and Tasks
EXAM: Understand the test activities and tasks
- Test Planning
- Blueprint for the testing process
- Test planning identifies resources, timelines, and responsibilities, and test criteria
- Clear direction, scope, and framework aligned with the objectives of testing
- Examples of scope could be identifying contractual obligations (which is your team’s responsibility vs other teams). It’s important to get diagrams drawn up that visually show in the test plan what’s being tested, what’s regression, and what’s not tested.
Test planning main tasks:
- Determine scope
- Identify deliverables
- Allocate resources
- Schedule test activities
- Define exit criteria (e.g., all P1 test cases tested, all Sev 1 failures fixed)
- Monitoring and Control
- Continuous tracking to compare the test plan against actual progress
- Compare test outcomes with expected outcomes
- Test Analysis
What needs to be tested based on the test basis:
- Review docs
- Break down requirements into test conditions
- Evaluate potential risks
- Prioritize test conditions
- Test Design
Details “how” to test:
- Convert test conditions into detailed test cases
- Identify input data and expected outcomes
- Determine test environment setup
- Organize test cases into logical sequences
- Test Implementation
Still not executing yet, but getting everything prepped:
- Create test data
- Document test procedures
- Automation scripts
- Validate the test environment
- Test Execution
Actual testing occurs. Regression checks too:
- Execute tests
- Capture and log test results
- Document discrepancies
- Analyze test failures
- Test Completion
Did we do what we said we would do in the plan?
- Evaluate exit criteria
- Document defects
- Archive test artifacts
- Disassemble test environment
- Conduct retrospective to identify lessons learned
Review Questions
What is the test basis?
Requirements docs, user stories, design docs, external regulatory docs. It’s what you’re “basing” your tests on.