Test Strategy

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Unlike the test plan, which goes into details and specifics, the test strategy is a high-level document that describes our approach to testing, and of course, dealing with risks is an integral part of software testing. Test strategy focuses on the big-picture view of the overall testing process and it will usually cover general risk identification strategies on the whole company level, while test plans will be project-specific. Test strategy can contain general guidelines for risk identification (without going too deep into specifics) and risk mitigation approaches, like risk-based testing, focus on test automation and planning for contingencies.