Vadim Konovalov
Below, you can see the main stages of the software testing life cycle. Of course, in an ideal world, you would not be able to enter the next stage until the exit criteria for the previous stage are met. But from a practical perspective, that’s not always possible. So, for this guide, we focus on the critical activities for the different stages in STLC. Let’s look at them in detail.
Source: https://innovecs.com/blog/software-testing-lifecycle/
The test closure — testers meet, discuss and analyze testing artifacts to identify strategies to implement in the future, based on the current test cycle. The idea is to remove the process obstacles for future STLC and share best practices for any similar upcoming projects.
The test execution — the testers carry out the testing based on the test plans and prepared test cases. Bugs are reported back to the development team for fixing, and retesting is conducted.
The testing environment setup is software and hardware tools needed for the test teams to execute test cases. In other words, this environment provides test execution with hardware, software, and network configurations.
The test case development — here is the time to create test cases. The test team prepares test cases, test scripts (if automation), and test data. After the test cases are ready, peer members or team lead do the review. Also, the QA team creates the requirement traceability matrix (RTM), a document that maps and traces user requirements using test cases.
The test planning — this phase of the QA lifecycle delivers documents, such as the effort estimation and test plan. The main goal of this procedure is to estimate the effort and budget of your project. Project managers can provide the test plan for different types of software testing, decide which testing tool is optimal, and evaluate effort estimation. Meantime, they need to assign responsibilities and roles to their team.
The requirement analysis implies that the testers try to evaluate the requirements of testing and define which of the given requirements they can test. If they do not understand the testing requirements, they can refer to stakeholders (client, system architect, or business analyst). Requirements can be either functional (features of software) or non-functional (speed, reliability, availability).
