Back to Gallery

Build an Efficient Process With a Test Plan Template

Operations
Test plans create a smooth process and help maintain quality standards. Use our test plan template to organize your strategy and manage crucial details.
Last updated:
February 27, 2025
No items found.
Back to Gallery

Build an Efficient Process With a Test Plan Template

Operations
Test plans create a smooth process and help maintain quality standards. Use our test plan template to organize your strategy and manage crucial details.
Last updated:
February 27, 2025

Test plans outline the scope, objectives and methodologies of your testing strategy. They guide your team through the process, ensuring you meet strict criteria and verify your project’s quality.

Using a template helps you gather and organize crucial details, allowing you to build a reliable reference without the time investment. Use our free test plan template as a roadmap and write a clear, consistent strategy.

What’s a Test Plan?

A test plan describes your strategy and provides an organized resource for testers, developers and your quality assurance (QA) team. It’s a detailed blueprint outlining who will execute each step and how to perform different levels of tests, such as functional and user acceptance testing.

For instance, a sample test plan might include timelines, testing techniques and success criteria. This document offers a definitive source of information for your team during test phases and creates a historical reference for future projects.

What’s a Test Plan Template?

A basic test plan template lays out essential testing elements and structures them in a practical order. While thorough testing plans are vital to success and quality, writing them from scratch is complex and time-consuming. Referring to test plan template examples helps you get started quickly, include the right details and collect necessary resources and links.

Who’s Responsible for Test Plan Documentation?

Software testing teams generally handle test documentation templates. This duty falls to the testing or QA lead, who has in-depth knowledge of team roles, testing techniques and compliance requirements.

However, the process generally involves collaboration from numerous people, including executive stakeholders and developers. To make this teamwork easier, use a shareable format for your plan to encourage quick, seamless communication.

The Importance of a Test Plan Template

A test strategy details which tests you must complete, how to perform them, and which roles and responsibilities are involved. It keeps projects organized and promotes exhaustive testing so you can maintain company quality standards.

Using a template helps you gather the correct information to ensure a thorough process. Without a predetermined structure, it’s easy to omit crucial instructions, links and objectives.

Templates also drastically reduce the time spent on a plan. Many groups, especially fast-paced teams using Agile methods, may feel compelled to skip over test plans due to time constraints. Using a template gives them a ready-made solution, making it simple to include this crucial step in their process.

Preparing an Effective Test Plan: 5 Steps

When you’re ready to create your testing guide, follow this test planning example to identify critical details and break them down. Then, you’ll have everything you need to fill out our template.

1. Determine Objectives

First, establish what you need to achieve through testing. This usually includes finding bugs and defects, validating performance and meeting compliance requirements.

Discover testing objectives by working closely with everyone involved in the project, including executives and developers. Software must meet business goals and align with stakeholder needs, but it also needs to meet functional goals like proper device compatibility. 

2. Break Down the Plan

Divide your plan into manageable pieces, including the scope, testing environment, and timelines. This will remove ambiguity and prepare you for a smooth, straightforward execution.

Identify and isolate high-priority, risky areas that could greatly affect performance, quality and costs. You want to help your team stay focused and minimize potential setbacks.

3. Develop Test Scenarios

Create test scenarios simulating real user interactions. You can prioritize these situations based on their likelihood and impact, but still keep in mind less common issues that could cause real problems. Examining rare cases (also called edge cases) might uncover other weaknesses in the project.

If scenarios are detailed and complex, teams often use test case templates to organize elements like inputs, outputs and step-by-step guides.

4. Choose Testing Types

Determine the type of testing you need depending on your team’s preferred techniques and your specific project. Here are a few common options:

  • Manual testing mimics the user experience closely, focusing on real interactions without the aid of automated testing tools. This includes exploratory, functional and user acceptance testing.
  • Automated testing uses software to run automatic, repetitive tests for quick assessments. This includes regression, performance and load testing.

We recommend manual and automated testing in a high-quality QA plan. While automated tests are quick, efficient and have a low chance of errors, manual ones simulate real experiences by considering human intuition.

5. Plan and Schedule Testing Phases

Develop a schedule, starting with testing phases. Account for each stage, such as setting up environments, running the tests and reporting the end results. Determine timelines for these activities, aligning them with development cycles to catch defects early on and encourage a smooth release process.

No items found.
Back to Gallery

Build an Efficient Process With a Test Plan Template

Operations
Test plans create a smooth process and help maintain quality standards. Use our test plan template to organize your strategy and manage crucial details.
Last updated:
February 27, 2025

Test plans outline the scope, objectives and methodologies of your testing strategy. They guide your team through the process, ensuring you meet strict criteria and verify your project’s quality.

Using a template helps you gather and organize crucial details, allowing you to build a reliable reference without the time investment. Use our free test plan template as a roadmap and write a clear, consistent strategy.

What’s a Test Plan?

A test plan describes your strategy and provides an organized resource for testers, developers and your quality assurance (QA) team. It’s a detailed blueprint outlining who will execute each step and how to perform different levels of tests, such as functional and user acceptance testing.

For instance, a sample test plan might include timelines, testing techniques and success criteria. This document offers a definitive source of information for your team during test phases and creates a historical reference for future projects.

What’s a Test Plan Template?

A basic test plan template lays out essential testing elements and structures them in a practical order. While thorough testing plans are vital to success and quality, writing them from scratch is complex and time-consuming. Referring to test plan template examples helps you get started quickly, include the right details and collect necessary resources and links.

Who’s Responsible for Test Plan Documentation?

Software testing teams generally handle test documentation templates. This duty falls to the testing or QA lead, who has in-depth knowledge of team roles, testing techniques and compliance requirements.

However, the process generally involves collaboration from numerous people, including executive stakeholders and developers. To make this teamwork easier, use a shareable format for your plan to encourage quick, seamless communication.

The Importance of a Test Plan Template

A test strategy details which tests you must complete, how to perform them, and which roles and responsibilities are involved. It keeps projects organized and promotes exhaustive testing so you can maintain company quality standards.

Using a template helps you gather the correct information to ensure a thorough process. Without a predetermined structure, it’s easy to omit crucial instructions, links and objectives.

Templates also drastically reduce the time spent on a plan. Many groups, especially fast-paced teams using Agile methods, may feel compelled to skip over test plans due to time constraints. Using a template gives them a ready-made solution, making it simple to include this crucial step in their process.

Preparing an Effective Test Plan: 5 Steps

When you’re ready to create your testing guide, follow this test planning example to identify critical details and break them down. Then, you’ll have everything you need to fill out our template.

1. Determine Objectives

First, establish what you need to achieve through testing. This usually includes finding bugs and defects, validating performance and meeting compliance requirements.

Discover testing objectives by working closely with everyone involved in the project, including executives and developers. Software must meet business goals and align with stakeholder needs, but it also needs to meet functional goals like proper device compatibility. 

2. Break Down the Plan

Divide your plan into manageable pieces, including the scope, testing environment, and timelines. This will remove ambiguity and prepare you for a smooth, straightforward execution.

Identify and isolate high-priority, risky areas that could greatly affect performance, quality and costs. You want to help your team stay focused and minimize potential setbacks.

3. Develop Test Scenarios

Create test scenarios simulating real user interactions. You can prioritize these situations based on their likelihood and impact, but still keep in mind less common issues that could cause real problems. Examining rare cases (also called edge cases) might uncover other weaknesses in the project.

If scenarios are detailed and complex, teams often use test case templates to organize elements like inputs, outputs and step-by-step guides.

4. Choose Testing Types

Determine the type of testing you need depending on your team’s preferred techniques and your specific project. Here are a few common options:

  • Manual testing mimics the user experience closely, focusing on real interactions without the aid of automated testing tools. This includes exploratory, functional and user acceptance testing.
  • Automated testing uses software to run automatic, repetitive tests for quick assessments. This includes regression, performance and load testing.

We recommend manual and automated testing in a high-quality QA plan. While automated tests are quick, efficient and have a low chance of errors, manual ones simulate real experiences by considering human intuition.

5. Plan and Schedule Testing Phases

Develop a schedule, starting with testing phases. Account for each stage, such as setting up environments, running the tests and reporting the end results. Determine timelines for these activities, aligning them with development cycles to catch defects early on and encourage a smooth release process.

FAQs

Test plans aim to organize a testing strategy in software development. Much like a project plan, these documents outline timelines, methodologies and participant responsibilities to encourage an efficient process. While teams must test their products no matter what, using a plan lets them record information for reference and ensure all factors are considered.

Easily duplicate this template by selecting "Save This Page" in the top right corner. Once you go through a quick sign-up process, you'll find the template waiting for you in your Dashboard or under Favorites.

There are three main test plan types:

  • Master test plans are comprehensive guides for the entire process.
  • Phase test plans cover individual stages.
  • Specific test plans describe the strategy for a particular activity, such as performance testing. 

While our template is best for master test plans, you can flex it to the other two through customization.

Scribe is a tool that creates step-by-step guides - instantly! Download our free Chrome extension to start creating guides for any process.

Click Use This Template at the top of this page to open the test plan template in Scribe. Then, click the Duplicate Page icon in the top right. Select which team you want the template saved to and whether to keep the linked Scribes. Click Duplicate, and the template will appear in your Scribe Dashboard within your chosen team. You can then open and edit it as needed.

Create beautiful process documents with Pages - complete with Scribes, videos, texts, lists and more. Easily create your next training guide, onboarding plan or SOP with Pages. Or, better yet, use one of these templates to get started!