What is entry 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 taken to ensure that the quality of the software is top-notch. The major steps in STLC are:

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

For each step in STLC, certain pre-conditions must be satisfied to proceed with that phase. These pre-conditions are called entry criteria.

There is a different set of pre-requisites in the entry criteria for each step that must be met before that step begins. If these conditions are not met, we cannot perform the task.

The entry criteria can also help us determine the cost of initiating a task or moving on to the next step.

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

• Unit Testing
• Integration Testing
• System Testing
• Acceptance Testing

Example

The following statement can be a pre-requisite in the entry criteria of test execution:

Verify that the test environment setup is complete and ready for execution.