Building a Strong Functional Testing Plan, Why is it Critical?
A functional test plan is considered to be a crucial step to scale up the activities of the application development life cycle and provide it with a proper workable platform. This will in turn ensure that scalable and optimal testing results can be achieved. But, in order to build a strong functional test plan, the concerned teams must draft clearly laid down guidelines and practices that can help in building a strong functional testing plan.
In this article, you will get to know what are the steps required to build a strong functional testing plan.
What is a functional testing plan?
The quality of the functional components of an application or system is measured by a functional test plan. The application is tested from a customers’ point of view. It makes sure whether the application is in line with the business requirements.
Following are the five steps required to build a strong functional testing plan:
1. Understanding the value of the audience: When a functional test plan is being created, the non-technical audience should also be taken into viewpoint. Therefore, the final document must not include references to underlying programming languages. When it comes to the author, it should be a person who has a good understanding and knowledge of the business requirements. The functional test plan should not be composed by application developers. But, again this depends upon the project scope.
The requirements that have been interpreted by the developers might be different from those persons who have created them earlier.
2. The time factor: The functional test plan should be created as early as possible. The work pertaining to the test plans can be initiated as soon as the functional specification documents have been completed. The flaws in the functional specs can be revealed by the test cases. The functional specs can be translated by the application developers into a more accurate application design. The changing business requirements should be constantly reflected by the functional test plan
3. Providing a proper structure to the document: There should be separate test plans for each use-case of the application.
There are six distinct sections in a functional test plan:
3.1: Update history: All the names, dates and update descriptions to the document are listed in this section.
3.2: The purpose of the document: The test plan that is going to test all the functions is listed in this section.
3.3: Pre-test setup: There might be some test cases that require the persistent state to run through the steps.
3.4: Analyze test cases: A list of test cases is included in this section, where a set of well-defined use case functions of the use case are verified by each test case.
3.5: Post-test setup: Specific instructions should be provided by the author on clearing any data through which the test plan will be prevented from being executed more than once
3.6: Test results: Information pertaining to test results such as screenshots or SQL run results are contained in this section.
4. Executing test plan: When all of the test cases have been successfully completed, the test plan can be executed by the tester. The steps of the “Pre-test setup” test plan are followed by the tester. Once the pre-test setup is completed, the steps of the “required input” section of each test case should be followed by the tester and the results in the “Actual Results” section should be recorded.
5. Test results should be reviewed: The reviewer and the business client of the test results should put a collaborative effort to review the test results. The ‘actual’ and ‘expected’ results should be compared by the reviewer in order to ascertain whether the test cases pass or fails business requirements. Business clients also review the test results and resubmit it to the development team for fixing bugs if need be required.
Conclusion:
If you are looking forward to developing a strategic functional test plan for your specific software project needs, then do get connected with a leading software testing services company UK that will provide you with a workable strategy that is in line with your project specific requirements.
About the author: I am a technical content writer focused on writing technology specific articles. I strive to provide well-researched information on the leading market savvy technologies.