Exit Criteria

What are exit criteria in testing?

Exit criteria are the defined requirements within software testing that must be met in order to determine that testing has been completed. These conditions are typically defined by engineering or test leadership to ensure quality standards are met.

What is the purpose of exit criteria?

Software testing teams will use exit criteria to determine if a test plan or project can exit to the next stage or be considered complete. This isn't something that should be left up to the subjective and/or ad hoc decisions of a test admin or SQA engineer, as it can directly impact the success of the next stage or project as a whole.

Creating exit criteria helps:

• Align your teams on a common definition of test completion
• Ensure your product meets completion standards before entering the next stage, which avoids costly project delays
• Create clear parameters for test engineers to evaluate software

How do delta tests leverage exit criteria?

Understanding when you should enter or exit delta testing is very important for product and engineering teams. Testing a product that isn’t ready for delta testing wastes time and effort, while exiting a product from delta too early risks a poor release.

Criteria for entering delta testing are:

• Largely feature complete: Teams will commonly begin testing with external testers at around 60% feature complete to help with issue discovery. But for a delta test that’s measuring satisfaction and evaluating product experience, you’ll want to test a product that’s 100% feature complete.
• Production (or Production-like) environment: While many companies use test environments for delta testing, testing in production (behind feature flags) or duplicating your production environment as closely as possible produces the most reliable and accurate results.
  

Common exit criteria for delta testing are:

• No critical or major severity issues
• Satisfaction scores ≥4.4