PLANNED TEST EXECUTION DATE – 3 QUICK LESSONS

If you are a seasoned tester, you will know how important it is to do the pre-work before test execution begins and part of test planning is to predict test execution dates for your test cases or scenarios. Tools like ALM make it easier for you to do this. But how do you actually decide which probable day in future you plan to execute these test cases and more importantly how to you validate that at that date you will be in a position to execute it. Dividing the number of test cases by the number of weeks or days of testing you have simply won’t cut it.

Test planning like many other phases in a project is not a stand alone activity, each activity is inter-related and most times inter-dependent on other activities. Planned test execution date is no different.

Here are 3 lessons I have learnt as a tester and a test manager.

1. Delivery dates – Find out when a piece of component or functionality that you are testing is getting delivered. What are its prerequisites and when are they getting delivered. This will help you decide the date on which to put those set of test cases.

2. Consider unavailability of resources – Find out what are the planned leave dates of the resources that will execute those test cases and also the planned leave dates of developers, leave dates include statutory leaves, annual leaves and company off days. If your development is out-sourced to another country, what are the dates of public holidays.

3. Build in contingency and outages – Get a schedule of deployment time frames to factor in down time of the environment, another good point to remember is batch run dates and or bill run dates ( if you are expecting some result of a batch then plan your test accordingly based on those batch dates and the downstream test cases after that)

Hope these lessons helps you.

Happy testing.