Test and Inspection Planning

Quality technique · See it on the map

Guide only — Deciding what and how to test is a judgment call.

Deciding, while quality is still being planned, what will be checked, how, and when.

When to use it

Any deliverable with acceptance criteria worth verifying before handoff — essentially always, with the plan's weight scaled to the deliverable's risk.

When to avoid it

Building an elaborate test and inspection plan for a trivial, low-risk deliverable where a quick visual check is proportionate — the planning overhead should stay smaller than what it's protecting.

Steps

1. List the deliverables and, for each, the acceptance criteria it must meet.
2. For each criterion, choose a verification method — 100% inspection, statistical sampling, functional test, or a professional/regulatory sign-off — matched to how costly a miss would be.
3. Decide timing: inspect at the point a defect is cheapest to catch, such as before it's covered by the next trade, not only at final handoff.
4. Assign who performs each check and who has authority to reject.
5. Define pass/fail thresholds in writing up front, so acceptance isn't negotiated in the moment.
6. Build the resulting checks into the schedule as real activities with duration and dependencies, not an afterthought tacked onto the end.

What it produces

• A test and inspection plan naming what gets checked, how, when, by whom, and against what threshold.
• Inspection points built into the project schedule.

Common pitfalls

• Planning inspection only at final handoff, so a defect that could have been caught mid-process — and cheaply reworked — is instead discovered after it's buried under later work.
• Vague thresholds like 'looks good' decided in the moment rather than specified in advance, which turns acceptance into a negotiation.
• Planning tests for the deliverables that are easy to test rather than the ones that are actually risky.

Worked example

For a deck-building job, Larch & Rowe plans a footing-depth inspection before backfill (cheap to fix wrong now, impossible after), a racking check before decking goes down, and a final walkthrough against the client's written acceptance criteria — each with a named inspector and a documented pass threshold, built into the schedule as its own line rather than assumed to happen 'at the end.'

Source

• PMBOK-6 §8.1

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition.