Entry Criteria
Entry criteria are the conditions that must be met before a testing phase can begin — a stable build, a deployed test environment, completed dependent features, or available test data. They exist to stop testing from starting on something not actually ready to be tested, which wastes tester time and produces misleading results.
Skipping entry criteria is a common way testing quietly turns into wasted effort — testers find bugs that turn out to be an incomplete deployment, not a real defect, and hours get spent triaging noise instead of real issues.
A typical entry criteria checklist for a test cycle includes: code merged and deployed to the test environment, build passes smoke testing, test data is loaded, and any blocking dependencies (a third-party API, another team's feature) are available. Entry criteria pair with exit criteria — one gates the start of testing, the other gates when it's considered done.
