Software testing

Entry & Exit Criteria
Entry and Exit criteria are required to start and end the testing. It is must for the success of any project.
If you do not know where to start and where to finish then your goals are not clear. By defining exit and entry criteria you define your boundaries. For instance, you can define entry criteria that the customer should provide the requirement document or acceptance plan. If these entry criteria are not met then you will not start the project. On the other end, you can also define exit criteria for your project. For
 instance, one of the common exit criteria in projects is that the customer has successfully executed
 the acceptance  test plan.

11.1 Entry Criteria

The entry criteria defines what all need to start the testing. It is very necessary to know for tester /QA
what should be start criteria for entering into testing phase.

In general, entry criteria is a set of conditions that permits a task to perform, or in absence of any among these condition will not allow to perform that task is taken as the Entry Criteria of that task.

Entry criteria conditions should be:
 All developed code must be unit tested. Unit and Link Testing must be completed and signed off by development team.
 Functional and Business requirement should be cleared, confirmed and approved.
 Test plan, test cases reviewed and approved.
 Test environment/test ware gets prepared
 Test data should be available
 Availability of application
 QA/Tester gets significant knowledge of application.
 Resources should be ready
11.2 Exit Criteria

The Exit criteria is a set of conditions based on which you can say this particular task is finished.
This can be difficult to determine. Many modern software applications are so complex, and run in such
 as interdependent environment, that complete testing can never be done. "When to stop testing" is one
 of the most difficult questions to a test engineer.
        Common factors in deciding when to stop are:

 Deadlines (release deadlines, testing deadlines, etc.)
 Test cases completed with certain percentage passed
 Test budget depleted
 Coverage of code/functionality/requirements reaches a specified point
 All defects are fixed or closed
 Closure reports are singed off
 All the test cases have been executed and passed
 Beta or alpha testing period ends
 Budget allocated for testing is exhausted
 The risk in the project is under acceptable limit.