Procedure behind entry and exit criteria in Testing

Entry and exit criterias are certain conditions that should be satisfied in order to enter or exit a specific project or cycle. In case of software testing, entry criteria defines the conditions to be satisfied in order for the testing to begin and exit criteria define the conditions that have to be satisfied in order to stop the testing. Both of these will be defined in the test plan. Once the entry and exit criteria are defined, approval should be obtained from the stakeholders if there is change in the defined conditions.

An example of entry criteria can be as follows.

• All the requirements are finalized and approved by the BA team.
• Requirement document is ready.
• All the defects from previous testing stages are closed.
• Dev sanity is completed.

Exit criteria can depend on many factors such as time, budget etc. Some of the cases of exit criteria are,

• 100 % of major functionality related test cases are passed and 90 % of low priority test cases passed.
• There are no SEV1 Defects or SEV2 Defects in open status, ie, high severity defects are fixed.
  • SEV1 Defects - when a server is crashed or network is down etc.., in this case we say the infrastructure has failed.
  • SEV2 Defects - major functionality of the site is broken, important pages of the site are missing etc...
• Planned deliverables are ready.

So in short, it can be stated that entry criteria defines when to start testing and exit criteria defines when to stop testing and both of this depends on the time, budget, defect criticality and decisions of BA.

I hope the above description was helpful for you.Thank you.