The Test Coverage Outline: Your Testing Road Map

To assist in risk analysis, prioritization of testing, and test reporting (telling your testing story), you need a thorough Test Coverage Outline (TCO)—a road map of your proposed testing activities. By creating a TCO, you can prepare for testing without having to create a giant pile of detailed test cases. Paul Holland says that a comprehensive TCO helps the test team to get buy-in for the overall test strategy very early in the project and is valuable for identifying risk areas, testability issues, and resource constraints. Paul describes how to create a TCO including the use of heuristic-based checklists to help ensure you don’t overlook important elements in your testing. Learn multiple approaches for critical information gathering, the artifacts used as input for creating a TCO, and how you can use a TCO to maintain testing focus. Take back a new, lightweight tool to help you tell the testing story throughout your project.