# Preparing for a Penetration Test

A practical one-page checklist to help your team get maximum signal and minimal noise.

## Why this checklist exists

Penetration testing can surface dozens—or hundreds—of findings. But the real value comes from a focused test with context, preparation, and clear success criteria. Use this checklist to make sure your team gets the most actionable results possible.

### ✅ One-Page Preparation Checklist

- **Define your objective:** What do you want to learn? Prove? Validate?  
- **Identify in-scope systems:** IPs, URLs, cloud accounts, and app versions.  
- **Share constraints early:** Maintenance windows, blacklisted IPs, MFA rules.  
- **Provide contact points:** One technical and one management contact.  
- **Clarify credentials:** Pre-staged accounts, VPNs, or test tenants ready to go.  
- **Establish success metrics:** What does “done” look like?  
- **Align communication cadence:** Daily sync, weekly check-in, or post-test only?  
- **Prepare your defenders:** Will this test be overt or stealth?  
- **Review reporting expectations:** Executive summary vs. technical depth.  
- **Plan remediation time:** Testing is step one; fixing is where value is realized.

💡 **Pro tip:** Treat your first test as a baseline. The goal isn’t perfection—it's to build repeatable cycles that tighten security over time.

### Common pitfalls to avoid

- Starting without a clear goal (“just test everything”).  
- Not involving operations or IT until the last minute.  
- Assuming testers can guess your environment’s priorities.  
- Skipping post-test debriefs and lessons learned.

Penetration tests are only as valuable as the actions they drive. Invest in the prep, define your outcomes, and you’ll turn a compliance checkbox into a capability multiplier.

Written by:

Chris Coppock — Founder, Red Raven Solutions