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Test summary and handover

Turn test runs into a decision record. Separate executed checks, blocked coverage, unresolved findings and the person accepting the remaining risk.

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How to use this

Useful for: Delivery teams handing results to a release owner or client team.

  1. Reference the agreed test plan and candidate build. Report the environment that was exercised and configuration differences that prevent a conclusion about production.

  2. Distinguish a product failure from a broken test and a blocked scenario. Count those states separately and explain whether reruns replaced or supplemented the original evidence.

  3. Link findings and retest evidence. Avoid presenting a successful fix verification as broad regression coverage when only the reproduction was repeated.

  4. Finish with the unresolved decision, responsible person and next action. Testing informs the release decision; it does not transfer business risk silently to the tester.

Scope and limitations: The short filled record below is illustrative. No client results, measured time savings or actual release approval are implied by the example.

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# Test summary and handover

## Identity and scope
- Product / release candidate / commit:
- Environment, data set and configuration:
- Test plan and execution period:
- Executor and reviewer:
- Included and excluded coverage:

## Execution record
| Scenario or run | Pass | Product failure | Test failure | Blocked | Evidence |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Use one consistent counting unit | | | | | |

Explain skipped checks and investigation of reruns. Do not combine original failures and successful reruns into an unexplained total.

## Open findings
| Issue | User impact | Status / retest build | Mitigation | Decision owner |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Link the private issue | | | | |

## Handover
- What the evidence supports:
- What remains unknown or untested:
- Proposed next actions, owners and dates:
- Release decision and approving owner:
- Monitoring and recovery reference:
- Where the team can find the test code and run instructions:

## Example — fictional invitation feature
Candidate: demo-42 on staging, isolated organisation accounts.
Plan: invitation creation, acceptance and role boundaries. Billing is outside this scope.
Executed: eight scenarios; six passed, one product failure and one blocked. These are scenario counts, not a coverage percentage for the application.
Finding: an already-used invitation returns a confusing error message. The ticket records exact reproduction steps and redacted response evidence.
Blocked: the email-provider retry scenario could not run because the test provider was unavailable.
Conclusion: the tested permission boundaries behaved as expected on this build. The report does not establish email retry behaviour or production readiness.
Next action: the feature owner arranges the provider test, reviews the open message defect and records a release decision after that evidence is available.

Store evidence with the appropriate access controls. Leave an explicit owner for incomplete checks rather than labelling them implicitly successful.

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