Developing a test strategy was a common process years ago. As teams went more agile and developing a formal strategy document seemed to be a more cumbersome activity, and it was. Hefty documents were created which were not referred to once after being developed.

Having no test strategy at all has the risk of loosing important perspective which aligns the team to work in a single direction. It gives an opportunity to stakeholders to think about what’s important for them and prioritize it. The catch – this has to be efficient and effective.

I’ve always found mind maps to be more helpful, while designing a course on test strategy, I put together a mind map to illustrate some key areas teams should consider.

You don’t have to follow this to the letter, use it as a reference and develop your own according to your product goals and needs.

Fill the form on the left to get the Mind map in high resolution.

Over the past 14 years Ali has lead automation and quality practices for 30+ products related to large-scale ERPs, Big data, SaaS, web applications and embedded devices across many organizations.

In recent years most of his work has been around IT transformation projects, guiding teams and large-scale enterprises in developing a strategic vision for quality, automation frameworks, quality gates across CI pipelines, quality process benchmarks, test roles within scaled agile framework and continuous testing enablers to develop Agile / DevOps culture to help teams improve product quality & time to market.

He founded Quality Spectrum with the vision of Redefining Software Quality through Technological excellence, Testing acumen and Business value. He advocates these skills across regular appearances across conferences, podcasts, trainings and articles.