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Test Planning

The place to start is with a plan. A written test plan will help you in a number of ways.

Test plans have two general purposes. The first is to remind you of what you have to do to insure good help. The second purpose is to tell management what should be done to have good help. You may or may not want to make management aware of the existence of a help test plan - this depends on your company culture and whether process documents are encouraged or required. Even if you are the only one who reads the test plan, it's still a good idea to create one.

The test plan is a roadmap that tells you which areas of the help will be tested, how they will be tested, and what the criteria are for quality. It's often been said that quality should be built in rather than added on, and following a test plan will insure that the quality is built in. The test plan should be written before the help is written but after the help is designed. In any given help project, a certain amount of its test plan will be generic, and a certain amount specific to that project.