General

A testing stage is a group of testing activities, which is executed based on the phases of the software development process. The responsibility of each testing stage may vary and must be alligned in each project with the customer. However the final acceptance test must be executed by the customer (which must also take responsiblility).

The following testing stages have been defined within ISTQB; as addition the developertests and component tests have been separated as in most projects they are executed separately (best practice).

Test Allocation Matrix

	Component Test	Integration Test	System Test	User Acceptance Test
What?	Components Modules	Internal Interfaces Building Blocks	(Sub-) System	System Documentation User Manual Contract (Software Development)
Why?	Functionality Adequacy Integrity Correctness Secureness Efficiency Maintainability	Functionality Interoperatibility	Functionality whole stack Portability Reliability Efficiency Useability	Functionality * whole stack Portability Reliability Efficiency * Useability * * Focus areas
How?	Whitebox (Static Methods)	Whitebox	Blackbox Equivalence class Use-Cases Limit Values	Blackbox Business Processes Use-Cases
Who?	Developer	Functional Tester Supported by Developer	Functional Tester Key User (Business department) Test Specialist (Non-Functional Tester)	Key User Supported by Tester
Where?	Development Environment	Several Environments Development Environment Test Environment Integration Environment	Production-Sync Environment	Customer Environment Production-Sync Environment

1. Developer Tests

Aim	Verified source code.
Typical Testobjectives	Program-modules / units like classes, methods and other software artifacts.
Executed by	Programmer, who wrote the code.
Responsible	Manager of the developer (Technic. Lead). In rare cases the Test Manager.
Kind of tests	Functional tests, in must cases implemented as Unit Tests, which are deisgned based on the programmed code.

2. Component Test

Aim	Components are – isolated and without huge organizational efforts – tested. Most issues are resolved early (before the start of higher test stages).
Typical Testobjectives	Smallest single or aggregated program modules, which have functional correlations and are testable.
Executed by	Team of testers, which must not be the developers.
Responsible	Test Manager.
Kind of tests	Functional tests like UI behaviour, validation scripts. Robustness and negative-tests are also included.

3. Integrated Component Test

Aim	The correlation of single modules (which are tested separately) are tested.
Typical Testobjectives	Aggregated components. This stage focuses on the integration between components.
Executed by	Team of testers.
Responsible	Test Manager.
Kind of tests	Functional integration tests.

4. System Test

Aim	The integrated system is tested (End-to-End).
Typical Testobjectives	The integrated system is tested.
Executed by	Team of testers.
Responsible	Test Manager.
Kind of tests	Functional tests (e.g. based on business processes) Non-Functional tests (Load and Performance Tests, Fail-Over tests) Regression tests

5. User Acceptance Test (UAT)

Aim	Acceptance-Criteria of the customers are met.
Typical Testobjectives	The integrated system is tested.
Executed by	Team of testers (customer) and key users.
Responsible	Customer
Kind of tests	Functional tests (e.g. based on business processes) Non-Functional tests (Useability)