QA Plan

QA Plan

What Is This

The QA Plan skill (qa-plan) on the Happycapy Skills platform is a comprehensive automation tool designed to generate structured quality assurance (QA) test plans for software development sprints, features, or individual user stories. It intelligently parses project documentation, including Game Design Documents (GDDs) and story files, and classifies each story by appropriate test types such as Logic, Integration, Visual, and UI. The skill then produces a detailed QA plan covering automated test requirements, manual test cases, smoke testing scope, and playtest sign-off criteria. Its purpose is to ensure that all stakeholders have a clear, actionable map of testing activities before any implementation work begins.

Why Use It

A well-defined QA plan is crucial to delivering high-quality software. The QA Plan skill automates and standardizes the process of QA planning, reducing the risk of missed requirements, duplicated efforts, or late-stage surprises. By integrating directly with your project's file structure and build process, it ensures consistency across releases and helps teams coordinate both automated and manual testing. The output of this skill becomes an authoritative reference for developers, testers, and product owners, clarifying exactly what needs to be tested, how, and when.

Key benefits include:

• Early detection of gaps: By generating the plan before development starts, teams can identify missing test coverage or ambiguous requirements.
• Holistic test coverage: Automated classification ensures that all types of testing (logic, integration, visual, UI) are accounted for.
• Efficient test automation: Developers receive explicit instructions on which scenarios require automation.
• Manual testing guidance: The skill outlines manual test cases and playtest requirements, ensuring critical paths are exercised by humans.
• Consistent documentation: Plans are output to a standardized location and format, facilitating easy review and auditing.

How to Use It

The QA Plan skill is user-invocable and can be run with different arguments to specify the scope of the QA planning. The accepted argument formats are:

• sprint
• feature: system-name
• story: path

The skill can be invoked at the command line or through the Happycapy platform's UI. If no argument is provided, the skill will prompt the user to specify the scope using the AskUserQuestion tool.

Example Usage

Suppose you want to generate a QA plan for the current sprint:

skills invoke qa-plan sprint

To produce a plan for a specific feature called inventory-system:

skills invoke qa-plan feature: inventory-system

Or for a single user story located at production/stories/character-save.yaml:

skills invoke qa-plan story: production/stories/character-save.yaml

How It Works

1. Parsing Scope:

   • For sprint, the skill reads the most recent sprint plan file in production/sprints/, extracting all referenced story file paths. If production/sprint-status.yaml exists, it uses this as the authoritative story list.
   • For feature, it locates all story files associated with the specified system or feature.
   • For story, it reads the designated story file.

2. Classifying Stories:
   The skill analyzes each story and any referenced GDDs, classifying them into one or more of the following test types:

   • Logic
   • Integration
   • Visual
   • UI

3. Generating the Test Plan:
   The output is a markdown file at production/qa/qa-plan-[sprint-slug]-[date].md. The plan includes:

   • Automated Tests Required: Scenarios and stories that must have automated coverage.
   • Manual Test Cases: Outlines for manual QA, including edge cases and subjective checks.
   • Smoke Test Scope: Key flows and functionalities to be verified in a build acceptance test.
   • Playtest Sign-Off: Requirements for user or playtester validation.

Example Output (Excerpt)

## QA Plan - Sprint 12 - 2024-06-10

## Automated Tests Required
- Story: character-save
  - Type: Logic, Integration
  - Tests: 
    - Save and load character data
    - Data integrity across sessions

## Manual Test Cases
- Story: character-save
  - UI validation: Confirm save button displays correct state

## Smoke Test Scope
- Basic save/load with default character

## Playtest Sign-Off
- At least one external tester must verify character persistence across three sessions

When to Use It

Use the QA Plan skill in the following situations:

• Before a sprint begins: Run the skill after sprint planning and before development starts. This ensures the team has an actionable QA plan aligned with the upcoming work.
• When starting a major feature: For significant new systems or features, generate a feature-specific QA plan to clarify unique testing requirements.
• For high-impact user stories: If a story introduces complex logic or critical user flows, generate a QA plan for that story to ensure focused coverage.

Generating the QA plan after implementation is discouraged, as this defeats the planning purpose and turns the process into a retrospective rather than a proactive measure.

Important Notes

• Automation is not optional: The skill expects that all feasible logic and integration scenarios will be automated where possible.
• Manual cases are for subjective or UI checks: Use manual testing for what cannot be effectively automated, such as visual alignment or user experience flows.
• Plan output is versioned and timestamped: Each generated plan is uniquely named for traceability and review.
• Works with existing documentation: The skill leverages your GDDs and story files, so ensure these are up to date for accurate QA planning.
• Requires appropriate permissions: The skill uses file system read and write operations, so agent and tool permissions must be correctly configured.

By introducing the QA Plan skill into your workflow, you can significantly increase development quality, reduce last-minute fixes, and foster a culture of proactive quality assurance.