Change the test plan to reflect reality, not vice versa.

Project managers want numbers such as percent of testing complete or percent of test cases run. But these measurements do not always match the testing you are doing.

Case in point - for the current candidate (for beta release), we were going to run the sanity suite, run a sample of tests covering the areas in which code has changed, run a sample of other tests, and do ad-hoc testing in some areas we think are at risk.

So we updated the test plan and the test matricies - we listed the number of test cases we were planning to run, and the number of sessions we were going to spend doing ad-hoc testing. # complete vs. # planned gives the percentages that the project manager wants to hear.

Note: we don't report # complete vs total # of test cases - that would just serve to confuse.  5:46:22 PM    

A good article on StickyMinds.com about what can be done when testing fails (a bad bug is found in the field).  11:09:14 AM