Test Planning Guide
This Test Planning Guide is designed for test planners and engineers who would like to inject greater rigor into their testing and achieve a deeper, more quantifiable understanding of a system under test.
This guide aims to walk the reader through the Scientific Test and Analysis Techniques (STAT) Process and offers a high-level roadmap of the critical activities, techniques, and concerns for applying STAT planning, testing, and analysis–with the presumption that readers have basic-level knowledge of summary statistics. Although academic references and industrial examples of STAT are available in large quantities throughout the document, many examples do not adequately capture the challenges posed by complex systems.
This guide does not give comprehensive instructions for implementing or performing these techniques; however, many resources are provided in each section that do. This guide provides greater emphasis on test planning since many of the key aspects of such processes and procedures reside in the problem definition and mission decomposition. Each section is accompanied by critical questions that are designed to prompt the reader to consider key aspects of the planning process.
Further information concerning mathematical and statistical details relevant to the design of test and consultation with STAT experts in the STAT COE is available via the
Ask-A-STAT feature of the STAT COE website. For real-world applications of the STAT Process, request a copy of the
case studies produced by the STAT COE.
