Designing your planning strategy will affect the way your team uses Xray and how your Test Plans are going to be created.
Select the Testing Approaches
You should start by thinking about how much will your team 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 test instead of checking if we can get an expected result and follow 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 may use the Generic Test type, but also you can check the Exploratory APP for Xray to run the exploratory sessions.
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 models about using Xray in an Agile or Waterfall model.
Some initial questions:
Are you working in Waterfall or in Agile (e.g. Scrum)?
Are you using versions or not really?
Instead of creating one Test Plan for your release, you may create multiple Test Plans to track different
Tests; This may be useful if you want to have clear visibility of how certain groups of Tests are progressing
and if their execution lifecycle is different from other ones.
Create Test Plans per Sprint, to track the testing being done in the scope of your Sprint
Manage them as artifacts of your Sprint and add them to your Scrum boards so everyone
sees their progress