Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Resizing Test Plan using Mind Maps

[Disclaimer: Experts! Please take a minute to rip me off, if you think this is the most ridiculous thing you have ever seen or if I wasted your couple of minutes with a dumb thought]
A lot of emphasis nowadays, is on moving projects to Agile methodology [or in many instances, pretending that project is in Agile model although in reality it is Short-Scheduled Waterfall Model]. Whatsoever is our thinking vs implementation may be, it is most certain that life cycle time is now reduced implying we have less time for execution (Testing) and even lesser / no-time for documentation of test artefacts. One such to be or not to be question on documentation is the existence of Test Plan / Strategy (given the minimalistic approach in projects the line that ever existed between these documents, I believe has long since erased).
Not a very long ago, this 40+ page document(s) which took a fair share of 2-3 weeks in the Test Inception phase for preparation and would go through a couple of review meetings (of an hour each?) and finally approved version would stay put in the project SharePoint folders until the Go-No Go day conflict arises to decide whether the defect threshold is over the limit or we are safe to sign off.
Although, I openly criticise over documentation, I strongly believe documentation should exist in any project albeit to only required levels. This was when I was struck with this idea of a one-page or a single slider Test Approach document (or to make it more apt! I would rather call it a Test Approach – Mind Map. Apologies! If someone already had this idea and documented somewhere, I just didn’t happen to search for it, for the sake of not to get influenced with the idea before I refine one of mine)
To illustrate my idea, I took a simple example of an E-tail App with Product Catalogue, Order Management and Payment Modules, which is implemented in 3 iterations to begin with.

This could be customised and enlarged and strung along with the Storyboard and could expand along to add points without putting a lot of effort on reviews and reworks. In real it might not as simple but I bet it is simpler than a 40 page document.

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