Generally,test plan document is prepared by TL&QM.

Entry &Exit criteria is part of test plan document

Entry criteria is 

- Testing environment established

- Test cases prepared

- Build received from development team

Exit criteria is

- All modules are covered or not

- All test cases are completely executed or not

- All bugs resolved or not

“In software testing, a test harness or automated test framework is a collection of software and test data configured to test a program unit by running it under varying conditions and monitor its behavior and outputs. It has two main parts: the test execution engine and the test script repository.”

Recovery/error testing is testing how well a system recovers from crashes, hardware failures, or other catastrophic problems.

Security/penetration testing is testing how well the system is protected against unauthorized internal or external access, or willful damage. This type of testing usually requires sophisticated testing techniques.

Parallel/audit testing is testing where the user reconciles the output of the new system to the output of the current system to verify the new system performs the operations correctly. Let us say, for example, the currently software is in the mainframe system which calculates the interest rate. The company wants to change this mainframe system to web-based application. While testing the new web based application, we need to verify that the web-based application calculates the same interest rate. This is parallel testing.

Similar to system testing, the *macro* end of the test scale is testing a complete application in a situation that mimics real world use, such as interacting with a database, using network communication, or interacting with other hardware, application, or system.

For both client server and web based applications, the testing is the same except one thing: We test web based applications in different browsers, for example, Internet Explorer (will test in different versions like IE 5.0, IE 6.0, IE 7.0), Firefox, Safari (for Mac) and so on where as for client server, we don’t need to test in the browsers.

Regression test cases are also based on the requirement documents. They are written more into detail and with every release (build), the testers need to do regression testing. The criteria for regression testing are; there should be no major defects while we do our smoke test and functional testing.