What is a Software Testing Life Cycle[STLC]?

 Software Testing Life Cycle[STLC] is a set of activities performed by testing team to ensure the quality of software. STLC is part of SDLC but includes only testing phases.

 

 The different STLC phases are :

1.Requirement Analysis.

2.Test Planning.

3.Test  Case Development.

4.Test Environment Setup.

5.Test Execution.

6.Test Closure.

Requirement Analysis: 

 This is the first step of STLC.The testing team understands the requirements of the project from testing perspective.The team ensures that the requirements are complete and testable.The requirements can be either functional or non functional.

Test Planning:

Test planning is the most important phase where in the Test Lead or Test Manager defines the entire testing activity to be conducted for a project.The lead calculates the cost and effort along with the schedule to complete testing.

Test Case Development:

Once the test plan is completed,actual designing of test case begins.In this phase the software test engineer prepares a test case document along with required test data to carry on the testing activity in an effective way.These test cases are reviewed by Test Lead to ensure they are complete and correct from functionality point of view.

Test Environment Setup:

It defines the software and hardware setup required to test the product or application.The testing team is usually not involved in the test environment setup.They perform smoke testing for the given environment.

Test Execution:

In this phase the software test engineer performs the actual testing on the software build based on the test cases.In case if the bugs arise the testing team reports the bugs to the development team.

Test Closure:

This is the final phase of STLC.Once the testing activity is completed test reports and several matrix are prepared and documented for future use.