‘Create an Agile Test Plan’ presents you with the challenge of creating a lightweight, living test plan that can help communicate how you are going to test a specific feature, epic or project. To help you get comfortable with creating a test plan in mind map form, we’ve going to create one for an imaginary set of features for an application. Can you come up with a test plan in time?

Instructions:

Download the template Test Plan mind map based on Kika’s mind map she presented in her talk “Mind Maps as Agile Test Plans and more”. Select one of the epics list below, or come up with an epic of your own and attempt to fill in each section of the mind map to create a test plan.

You can pick from one of the three epics:

• A cart and checkout system for an online store

• A dashboard system that provides real-time metrics from motor races

• A search system for a job site that includes keywords and filters

Tip: Struggling to add details? As this is a roleplay, try imagining if your team was responsible for delivering the epic you’ve selected. Based on your knowledge of your team, how would that affect your plan?

Wrap-up:

Mind maps are a useful way of making sense of all the different activities, resources and ideas that go into a test plan. By creating nodes for each aspect of a plan, you can quickly complete each area and encourage others to collaborate with you on what your test plan is.

Key Takeaways:

• Mind maps are excellent ways to explore different aspects of a Test plan

• They are lightweight enough to create but can communicate your plan effectively

• Test plans in Mind map form can serve as living documentation that is easy to update when plans change

What you’ll learn

Download a copy of Kika's template Test Plan mind map.

• How to write a test plan: https://bit.ly/howtowriteatestplan 

• One page test plan: https://bit.ly/onepagetestplan 

• The Software Testing Planning Checklist: https://bit.ly/testplanchecklist