At some point, you're going to have to test something.  Here's a little template that helps  out with planning the specific scenarios you'll need to carry out.  I've found this useful because being in a spreadsheet, it's easy to sort by pass/fail to determine what still needs to be squared away in order to finish testing.  Even if you don't do your testing by hand, this is also useful for plannign and listing out what test cases need to be built, if you use automated testing of any sort. 

Click here for the .XLS file.

Four of the five W’s, and one H.

What

A cost-benefit analysis is the comparison of what you expect to ‘get’ from doing a task, against what you expect to ‘spend’ in order to do the task.  The place where most people can get tangled up is really in thinking through the benefits and costs of a project.  It’s not easy (or necessarily fun) but it is important to be thorough in order to ensure that your expectations for an investment are realistic.

Who

Consider the common elementary school proverb:

There was an important job to be done,
and Everybody was asked to do it.
Everybody was sure Somebody would do it.
Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.

Most people expect someone in the ‘business’ to do the cost-benefit analysis.  The ‘business’ may believe that they can’t do it because they don’t know enough about the technical implementation to estimate the costs.  Truly, everyone has to do it, working together.