Test Strategy, Planning, and Risk-Based Prioritization Questions

Deciding what to test, how, in what order, and where to concentrate limited effort. Covers building a test strategy and test plan and the difference between them, scoping coverage against goals and constraints, the automate-versus-manual decision for a specific test, the automation business case (break-even, payback, and how to measure it), balancing speed, quality and cost, and risk-based testing: assessing feature and change risk, severity and likelihood scoring, prioritizing under time pressure, defending coverage trade-offs when the schedule does not allow testing everything, and judging release readiness. The scope is the investment and prioritization DECISION. Which test level a given test belongs at, and how a pipeline run should behave at execution time, are covered separately.