Entry, Exit and Suspension Criteria

Entry Criteria

Entry criteria is a set of conditions or requirements, which are required to be fulfilled or achieved to start a testing actviity.

Some of possible criteria are:

1. Complete or partially testable code is available
2. Requirements are defined and approved
3. Availability of sufficient and desired test data
4. Test cases are developed and ready
5. Test environment has been set up and all other necessary resources such as tools and devices are available

Exit Criteria

Exit criteria defines the conditions and requirements that are required to be achieved or fulfilled before a testing activity would be considered to be complete.

The commonly considered exit criteria are:

1. Deadlines meet or budget used up.
2. Execution of all test cases.
3. Desired and sufficient coverage of the requirements and functionalities under the test.
4. All the identified defects are corrected and closed.
5. No high priority or severity or critical bug has been left out.

Suspension criteria

Suspension criteria specifies when to suspend/stop all or portion of the testing activity as it provides no further value when testing is continued.

Some examples of this criteria include:

1. Lacking the availability of external dependent components/systems during execution
2. Defect is found and logged which blocks or prevents further testing execution. So suspension of testing process could happen until this defect is resolved.
3. When there is a predefined number of open defects (of certain severity). So testing could be paused until some sort of action/decision has been made.