Key Information in a Test Plan

Test Plan is a document providing structural approach describing how testing will be accomplished in the Project. This acts as a contract between testing team and stakeholders on how testing is planned for the project. 

For successful execution of testing in the project, it is very important to do thorough planning of the testing requirement and documenting the same in the form of test plan.

Most of the organisation have defined template for test plan and have slight difference in the structure of the test Plan from each other. What information needs to be captured in the test plan will be discussed in this article in the first section:

• Defining the Scope of testing – The first and one of the important component in test planning is defining the scope of testing and at the same time providing the items which are Out of scope of testing. Scope of testing should be in line with the overall scope of Project. Defining scope early in testing helps in defining the acceptance criteria and agrees on the exit criteria for testing.

• Objective of Testing in the Project should be defined - Objective of testing can be testing the functional requirement or creating an automation suite for regression scope. Also there can be multiple objective of testing with some critical and some secondary objective e.g. : Testing complete functional requirement of application can be primary objective of testing with communicating all known defects and issue with different stakeholder and closure on all of them before release to production can be the secondary objective of testing. All the objectives should be clearly defined in test plan. Each objective should have the priority defined and acceptance criteria should be associated with each test objective.

• Staffing and training needs for the testing team should be mentioned in the test plan.

• Environment and resource requirement required for testing, i.e. Software and hardware requirements should be clearly defined.

• Assumptions acts as probable risks to Project. All the assumptions should be added in test plan and proper sign-off  should be taken from stakeholders to keep them informed and confirmation should be taken from them for the correctness of assumptions made during testing and will not lead to possible risks in future.

• We should define constraints in the test plan. Constraints impact the efficiency and effectiveness of testing. Constraint can include for e.g. staffing, time or cost constraints

To summarize, so far we have discussed the ‘What’ part of testing, i.e. What we will test, what will be our scope, what our assumption, constraints are, what will be the scope of testing. Once we are clear on What, Next question is how to do what.

How Testing will be executed is explained in Testing Methodology. The Key points explained in Testing Methodology include:

• Define testing strategies for different phases and functional and non-functional requirements. This includes:

• Different types of testing required for requirement.

• Approach for each testing type, e.g. Regression, functional, automation or locale testing.

• Risk/issues identification and test data generation for testing types.

• Testing cycle for each testing and testing milestones are set.

• Entry and exit criteria for each testing milestones are described

• Providing defect lifecycle to be followed.
• Defining testing schedule in sync with the milestone defined.

Another Topic to be covered in test plan includes test deliverables and defining the exit criteria for testing completion. Test deliverables should be defined; it can include user guide, test scripts, test data, Test execution results, and Test plan.

Together, we can add matrix for different areas in test plan for easier understanding and better explanation. We will discuss on methodology and test deliverables in details in the next articles on topic Software Testing.

Risk Analysis - Next Steps for Identified Risks

Once by using different Risk Identification techniques as described in previous article, we have identified all the possible risk in the project life cycle, Please see  First Step in Risk Analysis – Techniques for Identifying Risks,  The next phases in Risk Analysis post risk Identification phase in order of their occurrence  are as follows:

•  Use Organisation level risk Management Template or use Risk breakdown sheet. – Most of the organisation has templates defined for Risk Analysis. It makes no sense to reinvent the wheel. Some of key data that we need to store for each risk are defined as below:

a.    Risk Definition – This explains what the risk is.

b.   Root Cause – We need to analyze what is the root cause of the risk. Analyzing risk root cause help to identify where problem and it is highly possible that more than one risk have the same root cause. So countering the root cause using control can help solve multiple goals in one go.

c.   Risk Categorization – Categorization risk is important to group risk. Risk can be classified broadly into three categories, Technical, Internal or External risk. Classifying Risk into categories helps to get proper input from the experts or specific team. For this risks can also be sub-categorized. E.g.: Risk can be related to Infrastructure team or Legal team, So we get input and control actions from the expert group in one go, and helps to get proper inputs from the required team or individual.

d.   Once we have root cause, categorization, and risk definition. We need to provide the control action on how to avoid or reduce the impact of risk.

e.   When we define risk, the probability of happening of a risk can vary from project to project. Probability of risk occurrence needs to be understood and provide in the template

f.    Similar to Probability, Impact of risk is very important. Even a low probability risk can be highly critical in case its business impact is very high. Control action is must, and should be well thought of as it can affect business

.

g.  We also need to identify in which phase  risk can turn into a loss. E.g. : Assumption which are also risk should be resolved in requirement Phase and so on. Response of risk events occurring early in the project should be handled first and detailed risk mitigation plan developed for the same.

h.   Risk should be quantitatively analyzed especially with high impact, high probability, or both to generate statically cleaner data for risk occurrence and its impact. Decision tree, distribution models, and tornado diagrams are some example of the same.

i.   Define the expected monetary value of the risk converting to loss taking into consideration both impact and probability

j.    Next Step is to assign risk to required stakeholders. We can break the document into high to medium priority risk and low and trivial priority risks in another document. So that major focus is not diverted on low and trivial priority risks.

k.   Once we get the response, we need to maintain the template document used with the responses and response provider to clarify with the Risk Owner.

• Once we have created the template, we still require regular risk meeting and risk monitoring in process, so as to add any new risk identified during the project life cycle and also to track how we are faring with the risk identified

Learning Selenium - Validating existence of object based on text of object

In this post, We will discuss on an example to verify if an element exist in the Page using Selenium. Together with Selenium concept of finding list of elements using findElements, we will discuss on following concepts useful on using Selenium with Java.

1. In this article, we will know how to create a generic function to verify elements of a specific object type based on text of object. Since this is a genric approach, we can use similar concept on working with multiple object. 

2. Explaining how to split a string based on delimiter into a string array.

3. Explaining how to use try catch statements to handle error in the Page. In case of no element found in the page matching the identifier, Exception needs to be handled using try catch block,

4. We will explain how to use switch statement in Java useful from a tester's perspective.  Switch is a useful concept to work with different inputs to create a generic function.

5.How to loop through list of elements is explained in the below example. Once we find a list of web Elements. how to extract each element in the list.

6. Creating a function with return value as boolean is explained.

Please find the code below: 

public boolean boolElementExists(String strObjType, String strText)
{
 boolean boolret = false;
//Suppose there are multiple object text provided of an object type provided in the strText, we will provide text separated by > .
//for e.g : login>HELP as link object in the Page
 String[] sre = strText.split(">");
// Loop through each of the text provided 
 for ( int j = 0;j<sre.length;j++)
 {
  List<WebElement> elemlst = null;
  // We will convert the strObjType to Upper Case and trimming the text around.
  strObjType = strObjType.toUpperCase().trim();
  //we will use try catch to return false mostly to handle scenario of object not found expection , in this case we will return false from the function
  try
  {
   //we will use a switch to perform action on an object.A case is used in this case to store different value in WebElement List Object. Using switch provides good option to create generic functions 
   switch (strObjType)
   {
   // in case of link object storing all the elements of type link in elemlst
   case "LINK":
// driver is already discussed in a previous article . Please refer to below article to understand how a driver object is created. 
Understanding Selenium Web Driver: Launching Selenium on different browsers

     elemlst = driver.findElements(By.tagName("a")); 
    break;
    // in case of link object storing all the elements of type link in label
   case "LABEL":
    elemlst = driver.findElements(By.tagName("label")); 
    break;
    // This is just a example , we can define other objects type also
   }
   
   // Now we will loop through all the objects of link , and whereever the text matches , we will loop out of the function and true will be returned.
   for (int i=0;i<elemlst.size();i++)
   {
    if (elemlst.get(i).getText().contentEquals(strText.trim()))
      {
       boolret = true;
       i= elemlst.size()-1;
      }
   }
   // In case no match is found , it will return false.
   if (boolret = false)
   {
    return false;
   }
   }
  catch(Exception e)
  {
   return false;
  }
 }
 return boolret;
}