# QA Plan

## Line-by-line Instructions

### Release Audience

Choose a description of your release audience that fits your goals for this release. It is common for different types of releases to have different quality goals.

### Why is this QA plan needed?

This is reusable sample text that helps motivate the QA plan as a necessary project document.

### What QA lessons were learned in previous releases?

If you have learned lessons from recent releases or similar projects, list some of them here. Explicitly stating lessons learned will help guide the planning of this release.

### What is the scope of this QA plan?

Some projects have a single QA plan for the entire system. Other projects use one main QA plan for the the main application, and separate plans for secondary deliverables such as bundled utilities, ports to different operating systems, or localized versions.

### What is the summary of this plan?

This prompt asks you to provide a brief summary of the overall plan that simply tells team members what will be done, without all the details found below. Consider how the sample text applies to your project. Work through the rest of the template before updating the summary.

### Quality Goals for this Release

Choose and prioritize quality goals for this release. Not every release can achieve every quality goal. Often, early releases will focus more on functional correctness. Only after functional correctness has been assured can performance and scalability be addressed. On the other hand, a very performance-sensitive product may have an early release of a working prototype that tests the feasibility of the design and leave much of the functional correctness for later internal releases.

### QA Strategy

Read the set of reusable sample QA strategies and select those that you wish to use on this release. Most projects will focus on just a handful of QA activities at first and then slowly add more as the product matures and the process becomes more refined.

### QA Strategy Evaluation

Use this grid to help assess the set of QA activities that you selected. Certain QA activities are better at achieving certain QA goals than others. The cells in this grid hold your subjective rating of how well each QA activity assures each QA goal. If you find that you do not have enough assurance for your highest priority QA goals, you should use additional QA activities that focus on those QA goals.

### Plan of Action

Once you have selected your QA strategy, evaluated it, and refined it, it is then time to put the plan into action. Sample tasks are listed for several QA strategies. Consider how these relate to your QA strategy and then add, edit, or delete tasks to match. Once you have outlined the overall set of tasks that are needed to carry out your strategy, assign each task to a responsible individual using your issue tracking tool.
