Embodiments of the present invention address deficiencies of the art in respect to software testing and provide a method, system and computer program product for serializing a templated markup language representation of test artifacts. In an embodiment of the invention, a method for configuring a test plan for serialization can be provided. The method can include selecting a template of a test plan through a graphical user interface of a test plan markup generation module executing in memory by a processor of a host computer. The method also can include extracting a table of contents from the selected template such that the table of contents includes at least one reference to at least one test case. Finally, the method can include transforming at least one portion of the table of contents including a test case into a markup language representation of the template of the test plan, for instance an XML representation.