Show me a 40-page QA strategy document and I will show you one nobody has opened since the kickoff meeting.
I have inherited more test strategies than I can count: beautifully formatted, well versioned, sitting in a wiki or on SharePoint, unopened outside annual audit season. The best strategy I worked from fit on a single page, and the team could recite it.
A strategy document's job is to tell a skilled person where to point their attention. One of my heroes, Elisabeth Hendrickson, has spent a career arguing that exploratory testing is disciplined, skilled work, not "having a click around." A good strategy exists to aim that skill at risk. Everything past page one is usually just paperwork defending against blame.
It is like writing a risk assessment for making a cup of tea: thorough, sincere, and read by nobody until something gets scalded.
What belongs on the one page:
- The three or four risks that would hurt the business, ranked, rather than a taxonomy of test types nobody asked for.
- Who owns quality for each risk: a name, not "the team" (which is how nobody owns it).
- What "good enough to ship" means today, specifically, not "high quality."
- What you have deliberately chosen not to test, and why. It is the bravest line in the document.
- Where a skilled tester should spend their next exploratory hour if nothing's on fire.
Everything else is theatre for someone who will never read it.
If your strategy needs a wiki, a table of contents and a search bar, it has become bureaucracy wearing a strategy's name badge.
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