High Level Expectation
1) what's the purpose of the test planning process and the software test plan?
2) what product is being tested?
Is this release planned to be a complete rewrite or just a maintenance update?
Is it one standalone program or thousands of pieces?
Is it being developed in house or by a third party?
What is the product anyway?
There must be a complete understanding of what the product is, its magnitude, and its scope.
A result of the test planning process must be a clear ,concise,agree-on defination of th product's quality and reliability goals.
It's impossible to find all the bugs,but can state, however,that the goals is for the test automation monkey to run 24 hours without crashing or that all the test cases will be run without finding a new bug, and so on.
People, Place and Things
Test planning need to idenitfy the people working on the project, what they do, and how to contact them. If it's a small project this may seem unnecessary, but even small projects can have team members scattered across long distances or undergo personnael changes that make tracking who does what difficult.
The test team will likely work with all of who work on the projct and knowing who they are and how to contact them is very important.The test plan should include name,titles,address,phone numbers, email addresses, and areas of responsiblility for all key people on the project. And similarly, where documents are stored( what self or file server the test plan is sitting on), where the software can be download from, where the test tools are located, and so on need to be identified.
If hareware is necessary for running the tests, where is it stored and how is it obtained? If there are external test labs for configuration testing, where are they located and how are they scheduled?
Defination
Don't take the list to be complete nor the definitions to be fact. They are very dependent on what the project is, the development model the team is following, and the experience level of the people on the team. The terms are listed only to start you thinking about what should be defined for your projects and to show you how important it is for everyone to know th meaning.
Build: A compilation of code and content that the grogrammers put together to be tested.The test plan should be define the frequency of builds(daily,weekly) and the expected quality level.
Test release document(TRD) : A document that the programmers release
