What is exit criteria?

Testing plays a vital part in the development of any software. Different types of testing take place to ensure different measures of quality.

The Software Testing Lifecycle (STLC) is a series of steps that are taken in order to ensure that the quality of the software is top-notch. The major steps in STLC are:

Requirements analysis
Test planning
Test case development
Test environment setup
Test execution
Test cycle closure

For each step in STLC, certain post-conditions must be satisfied when that phase ends. These post-conditions are called exit criteria.

There is a different set of post-requisites in the exit criteria for each step that must be met when that phase finishes.

Ideally, we do not move on to the next step until the exit criteria for the current phase are satisfied completely. However, in the real world, this is not practically possible. Therefore, we move onto the next phase once the critical post-conditions of the previous phase have been satisfied.

The entry and exit criteria are generally determined for the four test levels of Software Testing:

Unit Testing
Integration Testing
System Testing
Acceptance Testing

The exit criteria give us the following:

Test logs
Test incident reports
Summary of tests

Example

For example, the following statement can be a post-requisite in the exit criteria of the test case development phase:

All test cases must be reviewed and verified by the team leads.