Enough to support good testing, evidence and decisions. No more.
Documentation is useful when it prevents knowledge disappearing, makes important coverage repeatable, records decisions, explains risks or helps another person understand what happened. It becomes waste when the team spends more time feeding documents than testing software.
If your team is drowning in documents, an independent review can separate evidence you genuinely need from paperwork that exists because nobody has dared delete the template.
Keep documents that do a job
A concise risk-based test approach can be valuable. Clear test evidence can be valuable. A defect with enough detail to reproduce it is valuable. A release summary that explains known risk is valuable.
A 90-page test plan copied from the last project, containing three pages of definitions and a RACI chart for people who left six months ago, is less valuable. If creating those artefacts takes longer than the testing, ask which testing governance controls to remove.
Ask of every document: who uses this, what decision does it support, and what happens if we stop producing it? If nobody can answer, try stopping. The world may continue.
Start with the smallest useful set
For many ordinary teams, the useful core is surprisingly small:
- A short explanation of the important risks and how you intend to test them.
- Test evidence where somebody may genuinely need to prove what happened later.
- Defects with enough information to reproduce, understand and make a decision about them.
- A release record that says what was tested, what was not, what remains broken and who accepted the risk.
Add more when a real need appears: regulatory traceability, contractual evidence, safety, complex suppliers, repeatability, audit or a team large enough that knowledge no longer fits in people’s heads. Do not add documents because the template folder looked lonely.
Regulated does not mean unreadable
Some environments genuinely need stronger traceability, control and evidence. Fine. That still does not require decorative bureaucracy. Compliance evidence should be clear, controlled and proportionate to the obligation, not a punishment for everyone involved.
Separate evidence from ceremony
You may genuinely need records showing what was tested and the result. That does not mean the evidence has to be manually copied into three systems and a weekly presentation. Automation can capture logs, results and traceability without turning testers into administrative staff.
Be especially careful with templates inherited from large programmes. They often solve governance problems your team does not have. A two-person product does not need the paperwork of an aircraft-control programme merely because both contain software.
Good documentation reduces ambiguity. Bad documentation creates the appearance that ambiguity has been managed.
If your testing process seems to exist mainly to generate artefacts, get onto us. We can review what you produce, separate useful evidence from process theatre and help you keep the bits that genuinely protect the organisation.