What are test strategies?
A test strategy is a means of informing what your testing will look like. A test strategy will detail the approaches that you'll use, the structure of your testing, how you will report on your testing, any sources of oracles or heuristics that help drive your testing, and how you actually plan to execute your testing. A good test strategy evolves as a team and their approach to software delivery evolves.
How might you format a test strategy?
Test strategies can be drawn as models such as a mind map or diagram, written up as a single page strategy that provides a dashboard summary, or more commonly be written as a document with different subsections detailing different activities.
What's the value of a test strategy?
Sharing test strategies helps make information related testing and its activities visible to stakeholders and all the project members. The activity of creating these artifacts allows us to test our ideas and refine our strategies to improve.
Are there any pitfalls?
Needless documentation is waste. Make sure you only capture what is important and don't drown others in pages and pages of documentation. On the flip side, too little information would make the strategy too vague, and this will lead to assumptions. Things change. Strategies evolve as we learn more and progress through the project, so you should treat these artifacts as a living documentation and not hard rules.
