QA Revolution

Test Planning: Ensuring Efficient Test Coverage

Test CoverageTest Planning requires careful consideration and it takes time to do it right in order to ensure proper test coverage. Test organizations that don’t perform proper test planning often rush to test execution with little to no regard to proper test coverage. The result often has devastating results and has significant long term impacts. Lets review some issue which will occur as a result of poor planning.

 

Proper test coverage requires significant test planning time.  The more time spent in test planning will result in more efficient and reduced test execution time.  In general if you spend 3 to 4 times more in planning that test execution, you will have a meaningful result during test execution.  With the emphasis on Agile and Waterfall methodologies becoming more efficient, it is more important now than ever for testers to really think how something should be tested and have great test cases.  I prefer my teams have less test cases that are more efficient versus having many test cases that result in duplicate validation.  Testers often start out by thinking the more test cases that are created and executed the better testers they are versus their peers.  This is simply not true.  Efficient test coverage helps everyone and it reduces the amount of time that is spent testing.  With teams becoming more product focused, it is important to test the product you are working on and have other teams validate their products.

I hope this information has been helpful in understanding how to have efficient test coverage.