STLC – Software Testing Life Cycle Phases and its Criterias

18 September 2020

What is the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC)?

Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) is defined as a set of activities which is executed in a systematic manner to achieve the testing goal.

STLC phases

Each of these stages has an Entry and Exit criteria associated with it.

Entry and Exit criteria in STLC:

• Entry Criteria: It defines the precondition that must be completed before testing can begin.
  • One should check for critical functions before starting the full testing process, i.e. Smoke/Sanity Testing.
• Exit Criteria: It defines the conditions that must be fulfilled before testing can be concluded.
  • Test coverage should reach 100% of Traceability Matrix.
  • All the Test deliverables are shared with the client.

Test Planning

A document is created for what and how to achieve the required quality in the Application under Test.

• Analyze the business requirement.
• Find Test Objective
• Analyze the risks
• Test environment and test data preparation
• Define entry and exit criteria
• Define a Traceability matrix
• Schedule and Timeline
• Deliverable

Test Designing

It basically refers to identifying and designing of cases such that all the required functionalities can be covered end to end.

We need to test each possible function related to the requirement, it should meet the expectations.

So, we need to write all the possible steps for an action and its expected result.

Test Environment

The Test environment is a dummy environment with dummy data of an application to test and execute the test cases.

Test Execution

During this phase, the testing will be carried out according to the test plans and test cases prepared.

Bug Reporting and Management

If an action performed while testing a certain functionality does not meet the expected result, then it is a bug.

The tester will report the bug to the development team for correction and then retesting will be performed after the fixing of that particular bug.

RTM (Requirement Traceability Matrix)

Document that contains the mapping of Requirements and test cases to check the coverage of how much testing has been done at any point of time to make sure that no requirement is missed.

Test Reporting

In this last stage, the team will report all the test results to stakeholders.