Test plans

This topic describes the sections in a test plan.
Table 1. Test plan sections
Test Plan section Description
Summary Appoint the test plan owner. Use the full text editor to write a detailed description of the test plan. The section also includes the status of the work item that tracks the progress of the test plan.
Business Objectives Specify the business rationale for the release. Business objectives are often tied to financial goals, for example winning market share from a competitor or improving product usability and reliability.
Test Objectives Identify the success criteria for the project that can be measured and reported. You can define the goals for the planned testing effort. For example, an objective might be to track successes, failures, defect status, and issues in order to provide feedback to development before software is delivered to customers.
Formal Review List the people who must review or approve your test case and define the approval process. You can institute a formal review process that can help your business processes comply with applicable industry or corporate standards and regulations.

Each team member who is listed receives a work item notification. When team members respond, the plan owner is notified, and a summary of the results is displayed. The team owner then updates the plan accordingly and repeats the process until all team members approve.

Requirements List the requirements for a particular test cycle. You can create new requirements right in the test plan or import them from an external tool, such as IBM® Rational® RequisitePro®.

After your requirements are added to the test plan, you can associate them with test cases. By establishing the link between requirements and test cases, you can create coverage reports to determine the percentage of requirements that are covered by test cases. By maintaining this tight association between requirements and test cases, you can set up traceability throughout the project life cycle.

Risk Assessment List the risks that are associated with a particular test plan. Each risk includes an assessment, impact, a measurement of relative importance, and a mitigation impact. Team members can provide their own risk assessment in the My Risk section. The software averages the My Risk ratings of the individual team members and provides an overall score in the Community Risk section.
Application Security List the available test policies that you can add to the test case script.

A test policy is a predefined set of security tests that defines the tests you can perform, such as threat classes tests, application or infrastructure tests, and invasive or noninvasive tests. Click the test policy link to view and edit the details in IBM Rational AppScan Tester Edition.

Test Schedules Define the schedule for the test plan.

In this section, you can create multiple milestones or iterations, each with their own start and end date. Click the Add icon to add another milestone.

Test Estimation Define the high-level planning effort and test execution effort that are associated with this test plan. Effort can be entered in person hours, days, months, or years.
Test Environments Specify the test environments that must be supported and the resources that are available. You can use this information to determine the environments to be tested for each test case.

You can provide this information manually or automatically by using the product to generate this information. You can also add saved environments from a configuration catalog. After you include this information in the test plan, you can run a gap analysis of the environments that the test plan specifies against the resources that are known to be available for testing. In addition, you can create requests for lab resources.

Test Team List the members of each test team. As an administrator, you can perform various administrative tasks, such as adding users to team areas and creating new project areas and team areas.
Quality Objectives Review lists in table format the overall quality goals for a release, as well as the required entry and exit criteria for testing. quality objectives are defined at the project level and implemented in individual test plans, where you can track whether each objective has been met. Typically, quality objectives provide various measurements of quality for the overall release, for example, the number or percentage of high severity defects that are allowed or the number of failed execution records that are permitted.
Entry Criteria Specify the conditions that are required to begin testing, such as the minimum level of product and feature quality.
Exit Criteria Specify the conditions to meet for a particular test cycle to be considered complete. For example, you might specify that testing is incomplete until 100% of the test cases have been run and that all of the most severe defects have been fixed. During the course of a test cycle, you can adjust the exit criteria.
Test Cases Lists the test cases associated with the test plan. You can add and remove associations to test documents and create and associate a new test case. Removing a test case will remove the association to this test plan but not delete the test case.
Resources Specify the various shared locations to the artifacts referenced in the test plan.
Attachments Attach files and documents to the test plan, such as previous test plans, test iterations, screen captures, and other supporting material.

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