Are you getting optimal value from the effort you put into test documentation?
In many organizations, testers and test managers spend excessive amounts of time on
heavyweight, expensive documents and scripts that do little or nothing to move their
testing forward. Frequently these even impede testing by diverting effort that would be
more productively spent thinking about and working with the software.
In some other places, testers are floundering: trying to adopt a low-documentation
approach, but lacking information about what might meet their needs while still giving
their stakeholders what they need.
In this interactive tutorial, we will work together to explore how you can optimize your
test documentation to meet the needs of each project. We’ll take a thoughtful look at
what you can use to:
- Capture your significant thoughts and ideas
- Guide (yourself or others) in moving critical work forward
- Inform your stakeholders so they have opportunities to provide feedback
- Provide useful intelligence about your testing and about the software, so your stakeholders can make informed decisions
- Demonstrate due diligence where required for the record and to satisfy auditors and regulators
We’ll examine how others have used mind maps, diagrams, sticky notes, testing logs,
and other lightweight media to meet their requirements for optimal test documentation,
and how they might work for us. We won’t completely ignore the standard big document
templates, but we will discuss what’s useful in them, and what is not.
We’ll also work on strategies for convincing your stakeholders that it is in their interests
to promote optimal test documentation.
Whether your primary goal is to minimize waste or to meet your regulators’ demands,
this workshop will help you create test documentation that delivers the best value for you
and your business context.
