Designing your planning strategy will affect the way your team uses Xray and how your Test Plans are going to be created. 


Select your testing approach

You should start by thinking about how much your team will invest in script-based manual tests, automated tests and exploratory tests. 


Script-Based Manual Tests - Scripted tests are composed of a set of well-defined actions and corresponding expected results. The tester needs to follow the test steps and check if the result is as expected. For specifying this types of tests Xray uses the Manual Type.


Automated Tests - Automated tests are implemented as code, either compiled or not. Usually, they are executed during the Continuous Integration process, triggered by code changes or on a timely basis. Automated tests are a form of scripted tests. Xray provides two different test types that may be used to represent automated tests: Cucumber & Generic.


Exploratory Tests - With exploratory testing, instead of checking if we can get an expected result and following a script, the tester is in control of testing; they're no longer blindly executing what someone has predefined for them. The tester starts with a purpose, a mission and will explore the product in a defined time-frame in order to find information about the "unknown." For mapping exploratory tests, you can use the Generic Test type, but also you can check the Xray Exploratory App to run your exploratory sessions and have the results synched directly with Xray. 



Select the methodology - agile or waterfall?

Understanding what is the more suitable methodology for your team will impact in the way you organize your tests and create the test plans.

Check the specific modules about using Xray in an agile or waterfall model, later in this course.

Decide if you are going to use versions


Versions represent points-in-time for a project. They help you organize your work by giving you milestones to aim for. Assigning issues to versions helps you plan the order in which new features (stories) for your application will be released to your customers. 


Using versions can be very useful to track & manage releases. If you are planning to use versions in Jira, you will probably want to know how your tests are progressing for that release. Therefore, you can create a Test Plan per version.