Testing is often seen as an effort to determine the quality of the product at the end of a project, so it needs to be executed when development has finished instead of being a means to deal with risks at the earliest stage possible. Therefore, project budget, is in most cases spent on the processes that actually produce tangible products, at the expense of the testing budget. Whatever budget is left for testing will be spent on people rather than on test tools, especially since most of the mainstream tools are often perceived to be too expensive. A solution to this may be found in the use of open source test tools. With no license fees, the use of open source tools can provide a customer some of the benefits of test automation, without the costs.

This Software Inspection Master Plan template is a revised version from the original in Gilb & Graham's book, Software Inspection. This template is partially filled out to give you an exmple of how to use it.

You can use this spreadsheet to demonstrate the value of early defect removal. It includes defect depletion curves or phase containment effectiveness calculations.

When we mindlessly use templates to give easy answers, we're trying to play chess with a checkers mentality. That's David Gelperin's warning in this article. Templates related to context-sensitive issues require a lot of analysis. As he aptly suggests, "Perhaps every test doc template should come with a warning label: 'Not a Substitute for Thinking.'"