Product quality is a strategic requirement. When scaling, expanding to new markets, or adding a lot of features to your product, businesses often face these challenges:
- The QA team might be overloaded
- Deadlines are getting tighter, leaving little room for thorough testing
- No tolerance for mistakes, as any bug can impact users or revenue
- Limited internal QA resources for both manual and automated testing
- The increased need for stability and reliability during the MVP or scaling stages
- Preparing for audits or certifications (ISO, SOC 2, HIPAA, AODA) with high-quality standards
- Higher product load or seasonal spikes increase the risk of system errors. This can put stress on the database, backend, and how the interface works on web and mobile, leading to slow responses or crashes
- Clients of the online solution systematically face difficulties using key functionality, either because of persistent bugs or a poorly designed user flow. As a result, their experience is inconsistent, tasks take longer to complete, and overall adoption of the system is hindered
- End users encountering bugs or poorly designed user flows, preventing them from using core functionality
This is the moment to shift from ad-hoc testing to a structured approach that keeps risks, resources, and processes under control. Implementing a test strategy and a test plan, essential QA documentation, provides the framework and clarity every business needs to ensure reliable, high-quality software delivery.
In this article, you’ll discover:
- What test plan and test strategy are
- The difference between a test plan and test strategy in QA
- When and why you need each one
- How our QA and QC expertise helps teams launch stable, reliable products without delays or surprises
What is a test plan?
A test plan is a strategic document outlining objectives, scope, approach, resources, and schedule for software testing. It acts as a roadmap for testing activities and aligns all stakeholders. Therefore, with a clear framework, businesses can be confident that every critical part of the software is covered and tested.
Important: Test plan is updated frequently throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC) until testing starts.
Key components of a test plan:
- Scope
- Objectives
- Timeline
- Rules responsibilities
- Criteria
- Definition of done
Bottom line: test plan reduces risks and protects product quality. It helps outline steps, keeps everything in order, and improves productivity, specifically for a particular project or feature set.
What is a test strategy?
A test strategy is a high-level document that outlines the overall approach and guiding principles for quality assurance across a project or organization. It outlines a systematic approach to testing, focusing on the business goals and how they will be achieved. As a result, a test strategy helps improve risk management, perform better resource allocation, and ensure scalability.
Important: Test strategy is generally stable and rarely changes. It serves as a reference for all test plans across the organization.
Key components of a QA test strategy are as follows:
- Testing objectives
- Test approach
- Test levels
- Environment requirements
- Risk management
- Test selection
Bottom line: A test strategy sets the direction and standards for QA, ensuring consistent, scalable, and efficient testing across projects.
What is test automation in a test strategy?
In a test strategy, test automation is the part that defines how automated testing will be used to meet the project’s quality goals, including the scope, approach, tools, environments, and success metrics for automation. A thoughtful test automation has a direct impact on efficiency — it accelerates release cycles, reduces manual effort, and improves overall product quality. You can see these benefits in action in our case study on how test automation enabled faster releases and better quality for a telecom client.
Test strategy in test automation serves as a blueprint for what and how your automated software testing services will be doing.
Test strategy in test automation includes:
- Objectives: what you want to achieve with automation (e.g., faster regression cycles, higher test coverage, reduced manual effort).
- Scope: which parts of the application will be automated, based on test plan frequency and business impact.
- Frequently repeated regression test plans — automation with highest priority.
- Rare, niche, or highly specific regression test plans — automation with second-level priority.
- Newly created regression test plans — automation with lowest priority.
- Resources: the required team roles, tools, and infrastructure to implement and maintain automation effectively.
Beyond improving efficiency, a well-designed automation strategy enables cost tracking over time, showing the difference in expenses before and after automation implementation. This allows stakeholders to clearly see the ROI of automation as part of the broader test strategy.
Bottom line: A clear test automation strategy ensures efficient, targeted, and scalable testing, reducing risks, saving resources, and delivering reliable, high-quality software.
Test plan vs test strategy: Key differences
In QA & automation testing, the terms test plan and test strategy are often used interchangeably. However, they have distinct purposes. Here’s a concise table with test plan vs test strategy comparison to clarify the differences.
Test plan vs test strategy: who needs what
Let’s recap the essentials. When to write test plan or test strategy:
- Test plan: Created for a specific project or release. It outlines test cases, timelines, and acceptance criteria. A clear test plan also speeds up the transition into user manuals, as test scenarios can be easily reused for end-user documentation. This saves time on documentation creation and ensures that the instructions accurately reflect the product’s actual functionality, as they are based on verified test scenarios.
- Test strategy: Defined at the organizational level for multiple projects. Closely linked with the Road Map, it enables proper resource planning and identification of required roles to achieve QC objectives.
Who uses them:
- Test plan: Project team, including QA testers, developers, and project managers, to define scope, schedule, and resources for a specific project.
- Test strategy: QA and QC managers, test leaders, and strategic teams to set a long-term, high-level approach across projects.
How are the test plan and test strategy related?
A test plan and a test strategy work together to ensure efficient and effective QA. The first provides a high-level vision: it defines the objectives, guiding principles, and long-term approach for quality assurance across projects. The latter transforms that vision into actionable steps for a specific project, detailing schedules, resources, responsibilities, and tasks.
When using both the test plan and test strategy, companies can scale QA efforts without losing alignment with business goals. The strategy ensures consistency across teams and projects, while the plan provides that each project executes testing thoroughly and on time.
In complex development cycles, this relationship bridges strategic intent and practical execution, reducing risks, improving resource allocation, and ensuring that product releases are reliable, stable, and aligned with company priorities.
Crafting an automated testing strategy
A strong test automation strategy helps teams work smarter. This is especially important for SaaS and fintech, where frequent updates, data security, multi-tenant environments, regulatory compliance, and spanerse customer configurations require continuous, reliable testing to avoid issues, including downtime and performance. A set of useful tools can contribute the success.
Prompt engineering is key to workflow automation. For organizations, the choice of platform becomes a strategic decision. Low-code and no-code tools now go far beyond simple task automation. They enable AI-driven orchestration, data handling, and business process validation.
Organizations often face the need to integrate internal data with external data in real time, ensuring it’s always accurate and up to date. n8n.io is an open-source workflow automation platform that enables integrations with Google services. This one allows you to create various work tools without any programming knowledge or writing a single line of code. It includes over 400 pre-built nodes for popular services, numerous AI agents, and RAG support.
Microsoft Power Automate robotic process automation (RPA) tool that integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365, SharePoint, and Dynamics 365. Copilot AI Agent integrates with Microsoft Power Automate, leveraging data from Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Dynamics 365, and other sources available on the Internet. It has historical changes in its repository of business activity to automate testing and validation, reducing manual effort and errors. As a result, it enables automation of repetitive testing tasks, data handling, and business process validation without manual effort.
For development teams, Reqnroll offers an open-source Cucumber-style BDD framework for .NET. Tests are human-readable and aligned with business requirements. It supports collaboration between teams and integrates smoothly into CI/CD pipelines for continuous quality delivery.
Together, these tools create a practical, efficient, and scalable approach to automated testing. As a result, businesses get faster releases, fewer mistakes, and QA that truly supports your business goals.
NetLS’ QA/QC expertise
Since 2014, NetLS has been providing end-to-end QA & automation testing services. We offer a dedicated development team and deep expertise in technology consulting, test planning, and building an effective automation test strategy to suit each business’s goals.
Our ISO 9001 certification officially confirms the quality of our services, giving you complete confidence in the reliability and consistency of our work. With NetLS, you’re partnering with a proven and trusted software provider.
Our approach helps businesses:
- Optimize testing processes
- Create effective test scripts
- Tap into digital transformation thanks to leading automation tools
All efforts aim to increase speed and quality of feature delivery while reducing testing costs.
How our dedicated team works:
- Analyze the current QA process (coverage, automation, defect levels)
- Structure documentation according to standards
- Align testing with business goals, team capabilities, and risks
- Support implementation as needed
What you can expect from cooperation with NetLS:
- Structured, approved test plan or test strategy
- Clear visibility of testing objectives, scope, resources, timelines, and risks
- Scalable QA process through automation, team strengthening, and quality improvement
- Prompt engineering for workflow automation
- Reduced bugs through focused test planning
- Timely delivery of features to end users
- Reduced resource costs since one automation engineer can replace the effort of three manual testers
- Documentation ready for audits, investment review, or certification
- Faster market testing for Product-Market Fit
- Increased customer satisfaction and trust
- Higher product quality, improving end-user experience
- Revenue growth and expanded customer base
- Reduced costs via efficient testing and automated processes
- Enhanced product functionality and competitiveness
Our goal is simple — help you deliver high-quality products. We know exactly how to create a test plan in QA that aligns with your business goals and how to design a test strategy that keeps quality consistent as you scale. With smart automation and a dedicated team by your side, you can focus on growth while we make sure your users enjoy a smooth, reliable experience every time. Explore our QA & and automation testing cases — let’s align QA with your business goals!
Yuliia Suprunenko