Why Is Test Documentation So Important?

A well-functioning interaction system inside the team is a key to successful testing. This condition can be achieved through many factors, but the primary is the order in documents.

Any decent software testing company takes care about its internal organization and selects the convenient documentation strategy. The presence of such plan of actions is aimed to simplify the working process and to satisfy the client’s requirements in the best possible manner.

What Are the Main Test Documents?

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  Test strategy – contains the description of the testing organization as a whole, its goals and priorities, using tools, documents and resources, the team composition and its functions, schedule, and so on.



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  Test Plan – the main document provided by testers independently under the specified project, which characterizes its version, the list of responsible team members, the purpose of testing, the methods of checking, test coverage, and summary.



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  Test scenarios – the description of the entry conditions, data inputs, user’s actions, and the expected results.



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  Test cases – a set of conditions, realized in certain steps with expected result. It is created by testers, and then the test execution takes place. The test case is based on the listed above documents and also client’s specification.



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  Automatic tests – script-based tests which do not need manually written documentation.

All of the listed documents are severe important in the case of a test procedure, as within the whole working process as under the determined project.

One very important type of data, mentioned slightly, but truly the most essential – software test documentation, is provided by the client. One should note here that the absence or incomplete documentation can significantly complicate the life of a tester, performing, for example, functional testing or localization testing.

What Are the Consequences of the Inferior Test Requirements?

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  Skipping – one or more functions is not written in the specification. For instance, the “Error message” is not displayed after the “Password” field is filled with spaces during white-box testing. The tester has detected the bug, although, this bug was not specified in the spec.



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  Disputing – there are several requirements that cannot be carried out simultaneously, but the system necessitates exactly this.



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  Gap information – executing manual testing, a tester can face with the problem of data lack. For example, the realization of the filter criteria on the online shopping website is not specified, thus the system provides unnecessary requests.



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  Equivocal statement – double entendre is a frequent problem under software product testing. Different people can consume the same information in various ways.