Full Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC): Everything You Need to Know

Testing used to be overlooked, but now it’s one of the most important processes in software development. Learn all the ins and outs of the software testing life cycle and implement it in your own projects.

Why testing is important in the software development life cycle

The global software testing market surpassed $40 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7% from 2021 to 2027 according to?Global Market Insights. In 2022, as the products become more complex, using AI and machine learning, QA becomes even more important.?

Quality assurance used to be overlooked by software developers. After they understood its importance, a common practice was to test the whole product after it was fully developed. Currently, the rules have changed, and businesses are ready to invest in?software testing and quality assurance services.

Quality assurance used to be overlooked by software developers. Even now clients are sometimes hesitant to invest in it properly, but QA and testing is paramount for a software product’s success

Iryna Nema, Lead QA at Mobindustry

Businesses’ revenue and reputation depend now on the quality of their software, so quality assurance has to be prioritized. At the same time, the software world changes so fast, that businesses can’t afford to spend weeks on QA and redoing the whole project after it’s already been developed.?

The Agile approach to quality assurance as well as?custom mobile app development services?has become widespread because it allows to solve issues gradually and avoid large inconsistencies in complex products. Each piece of software that’s being developed, is immediately tested. The processes of development and QA have become standardized, and are now deeply integrated with the Agile methodology.?

In this article, you’ll learn about the software testing life cycle, its components, software testing phases, and best practices. I’ll explain the software testing life cycle in Agile and the changes it makes in the stages of the software testing life cycle.

What is the software testing life cycle?

The software testing cycle is a chain of tasks and activities that are created to analyze the current state of software, check its compliance with the requirements and build a plan for its improvement.?

In which phase of the system life cycle is software testing performed? As I already mentioned, previously a quality assurance lifecycle happened at the end of the development process, just before the release. However, as software became more complex, and the requirements for its quality became more strict, the logic of STLC in software testing evolved as well.?

Mobile App Testing Techniques: Everything You Need to Know

Now, the code must go through many regular QA cycles at each stage of software development: companies don’t wait for the whole product to be ready to test it. Rather, they test it in batches and use these methods to optimize the repeating testing cycles:

• Test automation
• Crowdtesting
• Test-driven development
• Shift-left testing
• Shift-right testing

An efficient QA life cycle that is repeated during the development leads to high code quality and reliability because it avoids the global issues developers often encounter when checking software after it’s fully developed.?

With STLC, you get a usable, well-performing product that is in line with your requirements. Thus, it brings you more customer satisfaction, and consequently more revenue.?

So, what are the steps in the software testing life cycle?

Main phases of Software testing life cycle

Every software QA life cycle has six main phases:

1. Requirement analysis
2. Test planning
3. Test case development
4. Test environment setup
5. Test execution
6. Test cycle closure

All these stages have their own parameters that include:

• Entry criteria — are all the tasks and items that should be completed before the testing begins.?
• Exit criteria — includes all the items that need to be present before the testing can finish
• Deliverables and Activities — items on a project like features, particular functionality, elements of code, and also tasks, for example, code review

In the perfect world, you should never start the next phase before the criteria for the previous phase are met. However, in the real world, it doesn’t always happen like this, so you need to always consider these risks when planning your QA process.

Let’s now talk in detail about all the phases of the testing life cycle and describe the activities and deliverables for each phase.

Requirement analysis

Every development project should start with requirements. At Mobindustry we extract them at the discovery phase of a project, where we talk with our clients about their business processes, goals, objectives, and expectations. The requirements document contains business needs, architecture, features and functionality, technologies, system requirements, target devices, functional and non-functional specifications, and even a list of stakeholders and people responsible for each stage of the project.

Discovery Phase of a Software Development Project: What It Is and Why You Need It

Everything on this list that can be tested, must be checked by quality assurance specialists. Usually, they create their own QA documentation on top of technical specifications, where they define their activities and requirements. While creating this document with a strategy, the QA team brainstorms and identifies blind spots. If they lack requirements, the team should clarify them with business or engineering stakeholders.

At this stage, the QA team with the stakeholders decide if it’s feasible to automate quality assurance. Most large and complex projects benefit from automated testing because of the high volume of repetitive tasks.?

Let’s talk about the activities and deliverables of the requirement phase.

Activities:

• Identifying types of tests
• Gathering requirements and prioritizing them
• Preparing a Requirement traceability matrix (RTM)
• Analyzing the feasibility of automated testing
• Defining the strategy and environment

Deliverables:

• RTM
• Automation feasibility report (optional)

Test planning

Want to learn more about the best practices of software testing? Read the full article at Mobindustry.net.