Chapter Five · The Craft, Written Down
Test Documentation
Chapter 4 taught the choosing; this chapter teaches the writing-down — so your designed checks survive contact with a team, a redesign, and you-in-six-months. The one-page plan that answers five questions, the test case built properly and then broken twice so you can see the failure modes, the three documentation weights and when each earns its cost, and the unglamorous pair nobody warns juniors about: test data manufactured to specification, and the traceability thread that answers "are we covered?" with a link instead of a shrug.
Documentation has a bad reputation among beginners — it sounds like the boring part after the real work. This chapter argues the opposite: written-down testing is what makes your thinking reviewable, your checks repeatable by others, and your coverage claims honest. The trick is proportion, and proportion is this chapter's real subject: every artifact here comes in a right-sized version, from the one-page plan to traceability-as-tracker-links.
Four topics. The test plan and its five deliberate answers — scope, approach, people, schedule, risks — plus the entry and exit criteria that make release day sane. The test case anatomy on a real example, TC-118, then deliberately broken both ways. The three formats — script, checklist, charter — and the maturity flow between them. And test data with traceability: canonical fixtures, the three hygiene failures, the never-real-data rule, and the thread from story to test to bug.