Clear Test Plans as a Tool for Client Transparency

To start off – in developing software, delivering a working product is only a partially complete job. Second important part is making sure that everyone involved in the process understands what has been tested, what still requires team’s attention, and whether the product is ready for release. This becomes important when the QA team works directly with a client or as part of a distributed development team.

One of the simplest and most effective ways to achieve this – having a clear and well-structured Test Plan.

A Test Plan is often seen as a QA Document which was created at the beginning of a testing cycle and updated when necessary. However, it is quite valuable and goes far beyond organizing testing effort. If written properly, it becomes a communication tool that helps clients understand what is going to be tested and where are we currently on the testing progress side of things. In simple terms – it gives them transparency and a feeling of a shared understanding of what the testing process is supposed to achieve.

A Clear Test Plan Creates Shared Expectations and Makes Testing Progress Visible

One of the biggest advantages of a well-defined Test Plan is that it reduces ambiguity.

Let’s imagine a scenario: a team preparing to test a new payment feature. The client, naturally,  expects the QA team to verify successful transactions, failed payments, refunds, and payment history – in a couple of words, business critical things. However, the team interprets the task at hand more narrowly, more specific, and focuses only on successful and unsuccessful transactions, happy paths as one might call them.

Both QA team and the client sides believe that testing is progressing according to plan without any issues – and they would be right, but there’s one key thing you might already see – their expectations are a tad bit different. There’s a chance that this created gap might only reveal itself shortly before release, when there would be no-to-little time for any type of change to cover the missing coverage resulting not only in working more diligently overtime for the thing to be fixed, probably delaying the time of the release itself, but for the company as a whole to lose money, time and its established reputation.

A clear, transparent, Test Plan can prevent this situation by explicitly showing the scope of testing and identifying what is included and excluded from it.

This doesn’t mean that any test case must be written in advance. Requirements have a tendency to change sometimes when new risks can reveal themselves and as a result priorities can shift during development. But the key thing is to make these changes visible, understand, and communicate their impact.

When both client and QA team understand and agree on the testing scope, managing expectations and avoiding any misunderstandings becomes easier further down the development cycle.

It, being the test plan, also becomes a meaningful foundation for progress reporting.

Instead of sharing only general info on the daily scrum meeting, QA engineers can combine their testing progress to specific activities, features, or requirements making it easier for the client side to get a grasp on not just how much work has been completed, but what exactly that work means for the product itself.

Let’s take into consideration two different status updates:

“Regression testing is nearing it’s end, would take a bit and currently we are at 90% completion.”

“Regression is 90% done. From out side – authentication and user management have passed, while payment logging still needs to be checked. Two high-priority bugs remain open and for one of them the QA team already took one to verify.”

As we can see the second update gives the client side actual useful info rather than the plain statistics and percentages. 

This level of clarity is extra valuable when working with international clients or distributed contractor teams, where daily meetings are not as frequent due to different time zones.

It specifically tells what was tested, what we have remaining, and where the risks could be hiding.

Test Plans Help Identify Risks Before They Become Problems

And here we transition to another important aspect of client transparency and it is rather simple – being honest about risks.

A Test Plan should account for potential limitations, any kind of dependencies and areas that may need additional attention instead of simply describe the ideal testing scenario, the latter would not be enough without the former.

For example, testing itself could depend on a variety of different things which is included and not limited by: access to different environments, stable test data, third-party integrations, hardware availability if project is embedded related, etc… If one of these things is unavailable, it will affect the testing coverage and schedule.

Documenting dependencies, such as these, earlier gives the client an opportunity to assist – resolve issues or potential blockers before they become real release or business-affecting issues.

Same kind of principle applies to bugs. A clear Test Plan helps understand the difference between already done testing, left over work, and known product risks.

But do not think that this kind of a Test Plan would become a guarantee for a problemless product, sadly uncertainty cannot be fully eliminated. Testing will always involve some level of unpredictability, however it makes that uncertainty more visible and therefore controllable.

And this is vital as knowing about a potential problem earlier in the development cycle is a ton more valuable than getting a perfect-looking all-passed report at the end of testing.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, being clear in QA is not about creating a lot of more detailed reports, no – it’s about making the right info available at the right time.

A well-structured Test Plan helps turn testing from something the client simply has to trust into a process they can actually understand and follow.

At Swan Software Solutions, we offer quality assurance and other technology services. To discover more about how our team can help your team, schedule a free assessment.