Think of a ‘good quality’ product—just about anything you think of as good quality. What are its characteristics? Ease of use, delightful experience, safety, suitability of purpose, innovation? We’re sure other characteristics come to mind.
Quality can be anything you define it to be.
However, quality is typically a key indicator of price. Meticulously handcrafted luxury goods cost thousands of dollars. To ensure authenticity and quality, customers spend good money on quality control.
From the guilds of the Middle Ages to the Scrum teams of today, quality is the cornerstone of valuable products and services.
If you’re looking to build a high-quality digital product, you need to master the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC). In this blog post, we will explore STLC in detail, outlining why you need it and how you can implement it in your organization.
Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC): Overview and Phases
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Is the Software Testing Life Cycle?
STLC is a comprehensive process followed by product engineering teams to test software quality. It validates the software’s reliability, security, and performance, ensuring it aligns with technical specifications and business expectations.
The software testing lifecycle is a series of six steps, which we cover in detail below. But first, let’s understand why you need an STLC.
Strategic quality control: The STLC ensures that you have a comprehensive strategy to ensure software quality. It helps teams cover every aspect of the product development process holistically.
Early defect detection: By following the six phases of the STLC, you’re more likely to discover defects early and fix them before they turn into issues for the user.
Cost savings: STLC saves costs across multiple dimensions. It prevents big issues, saving in costs of consequences or rework. It helps teams optimize software performance, saving in infrastructure and computing costs.
Customer experience: Through systematic testing across different environments, configurations, and use cases, STLC minimizes the chances of delivering faulty software to the customer. Good quality products offer a better customer experience. They entice people to spend more time on your product, engage to a larger extent, and choose your product over the competition, all directly impacting your topline.
Compliance: Good agile testing processes are fundamental to ensuring that your products are compliant with local, state, federal, and international laws.
It also creates an organizational culture of accountability. When you have a clearly laid out STLC, every team member takes ownership of their piece of the work, compounding software quality overall.
However, for the software testing lifecycle to work effectively, it needs to be integrated into another framework, the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Let’s explore the two.
The role of STLC in SDLC
In product engineering, software development life cycle (SDLC) and software testing life cycle (STLC) are essential frameworks that guide the creation and validation of software.
- SDLC is the process of planning, developing (and testing), deploying, and maintaining software products
- STLC is a subset of the SDLC, emphasizing quality assurance
Testing typically comes after the development phase in the SDLC, but testing-related activities begin much earlier.
For instance, during the requirement analysis phase in the SDLC, QAs (quality analysts) might also be involved in gathering quality requirements.
Beyond that, there are several key differences.
Difference between STLC and SDLC
These two processes are closely related, but they have distinct goals and phases. Understanding their differences helps clarify how testing fits into the broader context of software development.
| Feature | SDLC | STLC |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Creating and delivering fully functional software | Ensuring the quality and reliability of the software |
| Scope | Covers the entire life cycle of software development, from requirement gathering to maintenance | Covers only the testing stages, from planning to execution and closure |
| Output | Software product ready for deployment to users | A report to indicate readiness to release or a list of bugs to be fixed |
| Stakeholder | Broad team, including business analysts, developers, project managers, etc. | Smaller team, exclusively involving QA and testers |
| Phases | Requirement analysis > Design > Development and testing > Deployment > Maintenance | Test requirement analysis > Test planning > Test case development > Environment setup > Test execution > Test closure |
With that cleared, let’s see what the STLC actually entails.
Summarize this article for me pleasePhases of STLC
The software testing lifecycle is a circular process of six distinct phases with predefined entry and exit criteria for each phase. Each of these phases perform a specific function and achieve a certain goal. Let’s look at what that is.
1. Requirement analysis
This is the first and foundational phase of the STLC. Here, quality assurance teams gather the software’s functional and non-functional requirements.
For example, if the developers are building a login functionality, as a tester, QA will gather requirements about the designed login flow, expected security, UX, and performance standards.
The main goal of this step is to identify exactly what is going to be testing and against what standards.The best time to do this is in parallel with the requirement gathering phase of the software development process. This helps quality teams engage with stakeholders, such as business analysts, developers, and clients to clarify any ambiguities in the requirements.
However, it’s common practice to start this during the final stages of development or after the development is complete.
2. Test planning
With the requirements and goals in hand, it’s time to create a comprehensive test strategy and a corresponding plan. The outcome of the test planning phase is a detailed document that guides subsequent quality control activities.
In this stage, the test lead or manager outlines the following.
- Scope: Types of software testing to be performed (e.g., functional, performance, security)
- Standards: Acceptance criteria for each of these tests
- Resources: People, time, and tools needed to execute the test plan
- Schedule: Day-by-day plan for executing the test plan
- Risk analysis: Extent of risks and potential business impact
Test plans are typically made for the entire software and not specific features. This means that test planning often runs in parallel with the design phase of the SDLC.
3. Test case development
Next, the QA teams develop test cases. Simply put, a test case is a set of actions used to validate that a software/feature works as per expectation.
Each test case is based on the requirements gathered in the first step. Sometimes, teams use test case templates for speed and consistency. When no template exists, QAs write detailed test cases.
A typical test case includes:
- Test case ID: A unique identifier, often automatically generated by the bug-tracking tool
- Feature description: A short subjective description of what the feature is intended to do
- Test steps: The flow of actions in the feature
- Expected result: What the app is expected to do
Typically, there are more than one test case for each feature. In fact, test teams create a minimum of two test cases, one positive and one negative.
For example, the basic test case for the login functionality may include entering the username and password, clicking the login button, and verifying that the user logs in successfully. However, teams might build test cases for a number of scenarios, such as:
- Username and password fields disabled when a user is already logged in
- Inputting the wrong username
- Inputting the wrong password
- Inputting disallowed characters in username or password
Additionally, you can prepare test data (e.g., usernames and passwords). Once completed, the test cases are peer-reviewed to ensure accuracy and coverage of all potential scenarios, such as valid and invalid input testing.
4. Test environment setup
The next stage in preparing for strategic software testing is setting up the environment. This involves preparing the hardware and software conditions under which you perform the testing.
Here, testing teams do the following.
- Set up hardware, such as infrastructure, servers, network configurations, etc.
- Install software, such as databases, operating systems, etc.
- Smoke test the environment
- Keep environments as close as possible to the production setting
For example, if the application is supposed to run on an NGINX 3.19.0, the test environment should mimic this. You must also confirm that any dependencies, such as third-party APIs or services, are accessible and functional.
5. Test execution
By now, you’re all set and ready to execute.
- Run the test cases according to the plan
- Compare actual outcomes with the expected results
- Confirm if it is working as expected
- Else, log the defects
- Report the bug to the development team with steps to replicate the error
For example, if the login functionality fails due to incorrect validation, report the bug with details of the issue and steps to reproduce it.
Typically, the development team will fix the bug and send it back for testing. Then, you need to retest the fixed defects as well as the whole feature to ensure that bugs are resolved without introducing new issues. This phase continues until they execute all planned tests and resolve all critical issues.
Given that this process of cyclical retesting can get tedious, teams often use test automation tools. We discuss how you can automate testing in the next section. Let’s wrap up the STLC before that.
6. Test cycle closure
Once the product is tested and deemed ready to move to production, the test cycle comes to a formal closure. This is a phase of review and retrospectives.
- Review: Evaluate the test results, including defect reports and coverage
- Measure: Track key metrics, such as the number of tests executed, pass/fail rates, and the number of open and closed defects
- Analyze: Discuss performance with the business, development, and test teams. Take feedback for continuous improvement processes
Now that you understand the entire lifecycle of software testing, let’s see how you can automate various steps to make it more cost-efficient and effective.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Automate Your Software Testing Process
Throughout the STLC, there are various places where you can automate processes. Teams mostly use automation for unit testing (validating individual units of code) and integration testing (validating connected pieces of code). End-to-end testing to validate user experience standards is often done manually.
However, beyond the actual test execution, there is a lot more you can automate. Let’s look at some popular processes you can automate with an agile project management tool like ClickUp.
Automate agile testing processes
Most software teams today follow agile development practices, building products as small, interconnected components in an incremental and iterative manner. This approach works for testing too.
Integrate the STLC into the SDLC
Treat testing as an ongoing process that happens alongside development, allowing for faster feedback and quick adjustments to changes. Plan test cases while doing your sprint planning.
Choose appropriate tools
Given agile development and microservices focus on continuous integration, choose agile testing tools to support your efforts.
Write and integrate automated tests into the continuous integration (CI) pipeline with continuous deployment tools. Deploy a tool like ClickUp for agile teams to manage the testing life cycle across products, sprints, and projects.
Automate test case creation
Test case automation is the process of creating and executing test scripts that validate your application’s functionality without manual intervention. The best modern QA testing tools can do all this and more.
For example, it can repeatedly run the same tests across different environments, platforms, or configurations, ensuring consistency and saving time.
You can make this process even more efficient by using a tried-and-tested framework like ClickUp’s Test Case Template. With this template, create, organize, and prioritize test cases without worrying about documentation. Use this to streamline your test case development phase and build consistent automation with maximum test coverage.
Automate test management
It’s not enough if you just identify bugs. Strong quality assurance involves logging, reporting, tracking, retesting, and ensuring that the feature is production-ready. This requires an automated process. An automated bug tracking software can do all this and more.
Bug reporting
Make it easy for testers to log bugs. Use forms for software teams to let them enter all the necessary information in a format that works for you. Don’t start from scratch. Make use of ClickUp’s predesigned bug report templates to hit the ground running right away.
Issue tracking
ClickUp’s bug and issue-tracking template is ideal for this step. This highly customizable advanced workflow helps you trace the root cause of every bug. It consolidates information in one place, making it easy for your development teams to quash them all!
Resource allocation
Use ClickUp Automations to assign bugs to developers based on pre-set rules. For instance, you might automatically assign bugs in a feature to the developer who is assigned the corresponding development task.
Test management
The overall process of managing multiple bugs, test cases, use cases, features, requirements, and acceptance criteria can get tedious. To manage the chaos, create a simple and easy-to-use STLC structure, automating as much as you can.
Leverage ClickUp’s Test Management Template to set up your end-to-end solution for managing STLC. From developing test strategies to conducting tests, evaluating results, and collaborating with team members, use intermediate-level template as your foundation.
For example, with this template, you can create a test cycle folder for each release, add test cases for new features, assign them to team members, update statuses, generate reports, and more.
Automate test report generation
What’s the use of all the AI in the world if it can’t generate reports? So, put the latest tech to good use by automating test closure report generation.
Use ClickUp Brain to consolidate data/updates across various tasks and tests to create a comprehensive view for each stakeholder. Enable team members to ask questions about QA processes, status updates, performance, etc. in real time.
Need something more traditional? Try ClickUp’s Test Report Template to get you started on the right foot.
Automate progress-tracking
Test report generation is granular, typically created for each feature/sprint. For the bigger picture, try ClickUp Dashboards.
Visualize your entire STLC in one place. Monitor status of test execution status, big resolution, project health, and more in real-time. Create custom widgets for your needs, such as the workload view, goals tracking, etc.
The above list is just a start. With ClickUp, you can automate dozens, if not hundreds of project management processes effortlessly. To get you inspired, here are some automation examples.
Summarize this article for me pleaseEffectively Manage Your STLC with ClickUp
In software development, good quality is defined by a number of factors. Does it do the job it is supposed to? Is it easy to use? Is it fast? Is it secure? Does it use up too much network bandwidth? Does it work well in conjunction with other features of the product? So on and so forth.
The primary goal of the software testing lifecycle is to ensure right answers to all of the above and a whole lot more. Given the scale and complexity of software being built today, testing can’t be effective if it’s entirely manual.
This goes for STLC project management as well. ClickUp for software teams understands this and adapts itself to your needs. It includes a number of features especially designed for software testing.
For instance, you can create tasks for each bug you identify and set the task type as ‘bug.’ You can visualize burnup and burndown charts for bugs alone. You can create templates of acceptance criteria for each type of bug and automatically add it to corresponding tasks.
With ClickUp, you can effortlessly build high-quality software by identifying and resolving defects early, reducing costs, and improving user satisfaction.
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