Our Consultancy Gave Us a 70-Page Test Strategy. Is Any of It Useful?

Possibly. Length is not the crime. A complicated programme may genuinely need a detailed strategy. The problem is when nobody can explain what will be tested differently because the document exists.

A strategy is not good because it uses the words risk-based, shift-left, automation-first and continuous quality in the same paragraph. That is consultancy Scrabble. If you want us to review the strategy and tell you what is useful, we can.

It should make choices

A useful strategy tells you where testing will go deep, where it will be lighter, what different teams own, which environments matter, how integrations will be proven, what evidence is needed for release and what is explicitly out of scope.

If it says everything will be tested thoroughly using a comprehensive risk-based approach, it has avoided strategy entirely. Strategy means choosing.

It should reflect your actual system

Delete the company name and read a few pages. Could the same text be sold to a bank, a retailer, a government department and a mobile game studio without changing anything else? If yes, you may have purchased a template with your logo applied. A shorter document would still need to pass the basic test of whether a test strategy is any good.

The document should mention the awkward realities of your delivery: old platforms, fragile integrations, suppliers, data constraints, environment problems, unusual security risks, release dependencies and whatever else actually makes your software difficult to assure.

It should survive contact with delivery

The best test strategy is useless if teams cannot follow it. If the document requires performance testing in an environment that does not exist, or independent integration testing when the supplier refuses access, the strategy has described a fantasy.

Consultancies also produce documents that make sense to the people who spent six weeks creating them because those people remember all the conversations behind the words. The delivery team gets the finished PDF and none of that context. A useful strategy should stand on its own.

Ask what you can delete without changing delivery

Take a copy of the strategy and remove a section. Would anyone test differently tomorrow? Would any release decision change? Would any important risk lose an owner? If nothing changes, that section may be background material pretending to be strategy.

A strategy can contain context, but the important parts should have consequences. When everything is equally important, nothing is. The reader should be able to find the handful of decisions that actually shape how assurance is done.

If you want us to review a strategy, send it our way. We can tell you what is genuinely useful, what is missing and which parts exist mainly because somebody needed enough pages to justify a workshop series.