Testing Life cycle

Typical cycle for testing:

• Requirement Analysis- Testing should begin in the requirements phase of the software development life cycle.During the design phase, testers work with developers in determining what aspects of a design are testable and with what parameters those tests work.
• Test Planning- Test Strategy(Approach to testing),Test Plan,Test Bed(platform for experimentation for large development projects) creation.
• Test Development- Test Procedures,Test scenarios,Test Cases,Test Datasets,Test scripts to use in testing software.
• Test Execution & Defect Tracking- Testers execute the software based on the plans & test cases.Capture,review & analyze test results and report any errors found, to the development team.
• Retesting the resolved defects.Once a defect has been dealt with by the development team, it is retested by the testing team.
• Regression Testing- Small test program to ensure that the modified or fixed software has not ruined anything and that the software produce as a whole is still working properly.
  
• Test Reports- Once testing is completed, testers generate metrics and make final reports on their test effort and whether or not the software tested is ready for release.
• Test Closure- Once the test meets exit criteria, the activities such as capturing results,logs,documents related to the project are archived and used as reference for future projects.

Testing life cycle may differ for each organization.