The reason for this article is because it’s easy (and unfortunately quite common) for the game studio leadership to not understand the scope of responsibilities of the test team and their goal as a discipline, confusing QA with testing.

Many test planning sins can be easily hidden by over-allocating or misusing tester resources. In this article I’ll highlight the problem that it’s easy to hide ineffective test planning and what you can do to identify it.

The scope of work problem identifies that the extent of testing, and therefore work, is self-defined by the QA analyst creating each test plan on the project. 

As a result, it's difficult to determine if the scope of testing has been logically deduced from project factors or simply limited by the experience, attitude and drive of the individual planning each feature. 

The proof of accountability problem within testing describes the difficulty in making QA testers and QA analysts accountable for the work they produce and how this impacts the discipline’s performance across the industry. If we’re unable to accurately and fairly assign accountability, poor quality work goes unchecked and great work goes unrewarded.