What is a software testing life cycle

Software testing is an important part of software development. The software testing process involves all stages of the development life cycle.

The software testing life cycle is a part of the software development life cycle and the tests must be synchronized with each other. Testing design and development can be as challenging and time-consuming as building a software product itself. If you do not perform testing during the first software releases, many problems will be found at later stages of development. As a result, often the product release is postponed due to the long period of debugging and error correction for the program, which practically negates the benefits of iterative development.

The software testing life cycle includes the following phases:

• Requirement Analysis
• Test Planning
• Test Case Development
• Environment Setup
• Test Execution
• Test Cycle Closure

Requirement Analysis

During this phase, the QA-team analyzes the requirements of the client. This phase helps to determine the scope of testing. The QA-team can communicate with the client if some requirements are not testable or are incorrect.

Test Planning

The following points need to be approved at this stage. The team develops a test plan similar to the estimation stage of development. This plan includes the following:

• Definition of test requirements
• Risk assessment
• Definition of resources
• Creating schedules/sequences
• Developing a test plan

The testing strategy is approved during this stage.

Test Case Development

When the test plan is ready, the QA-team initiates the development of test cases. They also prepare test automation scripts, if required. A test case includes specific input, preconditions, a set of execution steps and the expected result. The goal of a test case is to find bug and defects and covers most of the usage scenarios of the system. If the QA-engineer is familiar with the system, the cases are naturally more extensive and in-depth.

Environment Setup

The test environment consists of elements that support test execution with configured software, hardware, and network. The configuration must mimic the production environment in order to uncover any environment/configuration related issues. To do that you need to analyze and prepare the environment and a list of software and hardware requirements for setup.

Test Execution

This is a process of running the code and comparing the expected results with the actual ones.

The process of test execution:

• System integration testing
• Bug reporting
• Defect mapping
• Re-testing
• Regression testing

The entry criteria of this phase are the completion of the test plan and the test case development phase, and the test data should also be ready. The exit criteria require the successful validation of all test cases. Bugs should be fixed or deferred, and the test case execution and bug summary report should be ready.

Test Cycle Closure

Test closure is a document that gives a summary of all the tests conducted during the software development life cycle. It also gives a detailed analysis of the bugs removed and errors found.

This phase formally announces the closure of the test. The QA-team provides detailed analysis and the project manager presents test metrics to the client.

Now that you know about the software testing life cycle, you understand what you are paying for and what value it brings to your company.