Evaluating Exit Criteria and Reporting, Test Closure Activities

Evaluating exit criteria 

It is an activity where test execution is assessed against the defined objectives. This should be done for each test level, as for each test level it is needed to know whether there was done enough testing or not. 

Based on risk assessment, exit criteria will be set as the measure "enough testing".  That means if the risk assessed is reduced and testing doe is enough then that particular test item is set into exit criteria. This criteria varies for each project and is known as exit criteria. This tells whether it can be declared that a given testing activity or level is complete. 

During this stage the following major tasks are identified:

• Checking test logs against the exit criteria specified in test planning
• Assessing if more tests are needed or if the exit criteria specified should be changed
• Writing a test summary reports for stakeholders. 

It may be a mix of coverage or

• Completion criteria (which tells about test cases that must be included to complete ,  for example "the driving test must include an emergency stop" or "the software test must include a response measurement")
• Acceptance criteria (which tells how we know whether the software has passed or failed overall for example "only pass the driver if they have completed the emergency stop correctly" or "only pass the software for release if it meets the priority 1 requirements list")
• Process exit criteria (which tells whether there have been completed all the tasks need to be done, For example  "the examiner/tester has not finished until they have written and filed the end of test report").

Exit criteria should be set and evaluated for each test level:

• Completion or exit criteria are used to determine when testing a testware at any stage is completed or not. 
• These criteria may be defined in terms of costs, time, faults found or coverage criteria and so on.
• Coverage criteria is defined in terms of items that are exercised by test suites such as branches, user requirements and most frequently used transactions.

Exit Criteria Examples :

Exit criteria is evaluated if it satisfies some the below conditions

• 100%  of statement coverage
• 100% of requirement coverage
• If all screens / dialogue boxes / error messages are seen
• 100% of test cases have been run
• 100% of high severity faults are fixed
• 80% of low & medium severity faults are fixed
• maximum of 50 known faults remain
• maximum of 10 high severity faults predicted
• time has run out
• testing budget is used up

 Test Summary Report :

The purpose of test summary report is to summarize the result of the testing activities and to provide an evaluation based on these results. According to IEEE std. 829 Test summary report consists of the following contents.

• Test summary report Identifier
• Summary
• Variances
• Summary of resultsà  1. Resolved incidents  2. Unresolved Incidents
• Evaluation
• Recommendations
• Summary of Activities
• Approvals

Test Closure Activity:

This is the last stage of STLC . During this activity , we collect the data from the completed test activities and we bring all the data into one format including the checking and fitting of testware and analyzing the facts and numbers .The major activities involved in this test closure are as follows

• Finalizing and archiving the testware, test environment and also the test infrastructure used in this test activity for the later reuse purpose
• Handover the testware to the Maintenance organization who handover it to the actual Client
• Analyzing the lessons  learned for future releases and projects and the improvement of test Maturity.