One framework that is appealing but requires organizational discipline is Acceptance Testing with Gherkin. The product owner writes User Stories in a specific

One framework that is appealing but requires organizational discipline is Acceptance Testing with Gherkin. The product owner writes User Stories in a specific human-and-machine readable format (Given/when/then). The engineers build the features specified. Then the test author converts the “gherkin” spec into runnable test cases. Usually you have these “three amigos” meet before the product spec is finalized to agree that the spec is both implementable and testable. You can have a dedicated “test automation” role or just have an engineer build the Acceptance Tests (I like to make it someone other than building the feature so you get two takes on interpreting the spec). You keep the tester “black-box” without knowing the implementation details. At the end you deliver both tests and code, and if the tests pass you can fee pretty confident that the happy path works as intended. The advantage with this system is product owners can view the library of Gherkin specs to see how the product works as the system evolves. Rather than having to read old spec documents, which could be out of date since they don’t actually get validated against the real system. A good book for this is “Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests” [1], which is one of my top recommendations for junior engineers as it also gives a really good example of OOP philosophy. The main failure mode I have seen here is not getting buy-in from Product, so the specs get written by Engineering and never viewed by anyone else. It takes more effort to get the same quality of testing with Gherkin, and this is only worthwhile if you are reaping the benefit of non-technical legibility. All that said, if you do manual release testing, a spreadsheet with all the features and how they are supposed to work, plus a link to where they are automatically tested, could be a good first step if you have high quality requirements. It will be expensive to maintain though. 1: https://smile.amazon.com/Growing-Object-Oriented-Software-Addison-Wesley-Signature-ebook/dp/B002TIOYVW/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=WSL7G1U3QJ4P&keywords=growing+object+oriented+software+guided+by+tests&qid=1650381999&sprefix=growing+obje%2Caps%2C125&sr=8-1 https://smile.amazon.com/Growing-Object-Oriented-Software-Ad...