SOFTWARE TEST LIFE CYCLE(STLC)

Testing  has many phases , as shown in below figure,

Requirement is the input for testing.

Test Plan – is a document which derives all future activities of the project. All future testing activities is planned and put into a document and this document is known as Test Plan. It contains – number of engineers needed for the project, who should test which feature, how the defects must be communicated to the development team, when we should start and finish writing test cases, executing test cases, what are the types of testing we use to test for the application etc. 

Write test case – we write test cases for each feature. These test cases are reviewed, and after all mistakes are corrected and once the test cases are approved – then they are stored in the test case repository.

Traceability Matrix – it is a document which ensures that every requirement has a test case .

Test cases are written by looking at the requirements and test cases are executed by looking at the test cases. If any requirement is missed i.e, test cases are not written for a particular requirement, then that particular feature is not tested which may have some bugs. Just to ensure that all the requirements are converted, traceability matrix is written. This is shown below,

For the requirements (3 and 6) for which test cases are not written, the cells are marked in thick border so that they are distinct and then test cases are written for them.

The Traceability Matrix is also known as RTM (Requirement Traceability Matrix) or CRM (Cross Reference Matrix).

Defect Tracking – any bug found by the testing team is sent to the development team. This bug has to be checked by the testing team if it has been fixed by the developers.

Test Execution Report(TER): - Send it to customer – contains a list of bugs(major, minor and critical), summary of test pass, fail etc and when this is sent, according to the customer – the project is over.

TER is prepared after every test cycle and sent to development team, testing team, management and customer (depends if it is a fixed bid project or time & material bid project).

The last TER of the last test cycle is always sent to the customer. And this means that the project is over-according to the customer.

Retrospect meeting – (also called Post Mortem Meeting / Project Closure Meeting)

The Test Manager calls everyone in the testing team for a meeting and asks them for a list of mistakes and achievements in the project. 

This is done by test lead or test manager. Here, the manager documents this retrospect meeting and stores it in QMS (Quality Management System). It is a folder, where inside this folder, there is another folder called Retrospect folder and here this excel sheet document is stored. When we get new project, while we write the test plan – we will open this retrospect file and will try and implement the good practices and correct the mistakes.