What Is The Difference Between Test Plan And Test Strategy?

Test Plan is a document which describes the scope, approach and schedule of testing activities or you can also say that it contains "what we will test in software", "how we will test it", "when we test it as timing of testing" and "who will perform testing". It is the responsibility of test lead to develop this document.

Usually a test plan contains following things.
(1) Scope of testing
(2) Testing approach
(3) Time frame
(4) Objectives of testing
(5) What will be the environment
(6) What will be the deliverables
(7) Risk factors
(8) Features to be tested

Test strategy is also a document and it is the responsibility of the project manager to develop it. It contains which techniques we will use and what will be the module to test. Here technique means type of testing. As different testing techniques can be applied to test software based on our goals. For example stress and load testing is applied on web based applications. We have to decide which testing approach we will use to test a module as following testing approaches can be used.

(1)Black Box Testing (2) White Box Testing (3) Ad-hoc testing (4) Acceptance Testing (5) Recovery testing (6) Sanity testing (7) Smoke testing (8) Regression testing (9) End to End Testing (10) System Testing (11) Functional Testing (12) Unit Testing (13) Alpha Testing
(14) Beta Testing (15) Exploratory Testing etc.

Test plan is a document which provides complete details about the resources which are used in a project. Also describe the scope, approach and other activities which we perform during testing. It is the responsibility of test lead to develop this document. It contains what things we are going to test, how we test it, when we test it and who will test it. I would like to mention key elements of a test plan which we mention when we create a test plan, which are given below.

(1) Test scope and its objectives: Here we mention the objectives of testing a particular module.
(2) Testing Strategy: Here we describe the strategy we used for testing the software.
(3) Deliverables of the test case: What we will get after executing testing.
(4) Test cases: We mention test cases for different modules.
(5) Test Requirements: Here we mention the necessary requirements for tests.
(6) Expected Result: it means that what result we expect after performing testing.
(7) Testing Environment: It means that what will be the software and hardware requirements for testing the software.

Test Strategy: It is the job of project manager to develop this document. This document contains which type of testing technique we will use for testing the software. As there are many types of software testing which are used in different circumstances for different purposes and it depends on the situation to choose a particular strategy.