What is a 'test plan'?

Test Plan is a high level document which intimates how a product will pass the testing activities, which will vary from product to product. Generally reputated organisations will follow the IEEE standard Test Plan format. The test plan consists about the resources utilization right from the manpower to the hardware info. This also mentions the test cases developed based on requirements, and further how to cater the changes (and updation of test cases or scripts), how test bench should be configured what are the resources required to establish the test bench, deployment structure, implementation architecture etc.

Test Plan should containing the details about the testing process. It is prepeared during the project planning phases.It should be containing the details about the resources to be requred, the testing approches to be followed, and test methedologies,test case etc.