STLC Explained with Real Examples from the Industry

🍵 The Unit Test Passed – Famous Last Words in the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC)

The production login page was throwing 500s.
Customer support was melting down.
Management asked, “Can we roll back?”
Dev said, “It works on my machine.”

And me?
I was staring at a Jenkins report greener than a snake in spring.
Cue internal screaming.

Turns out our test data didn’t include emojis, special characters, or anything remotely realistic.
Our test user? admin/password123.
You’d get more variety at a temple langar.

🧨 Let’s Be Real – STLC is NOT a Linear Process

The Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) is presented like some neat, linear checklist.
It’s not.

It’s a street fight.

With shifting specs, disappearing test data, and Devs who think console.log is error handling.

But for the poor souls Googling it, here’s the “official” STLC cycle:

Requirement Analysis
Test Planning
Test Case Design
Environment Setup
Test Execution
Test Closure

And here’s how those actually look in the wild 👇

🥴 STLC Phase 1: Requirement Analysis

Ideal scenario: Well-documented epics with testable requirements and ACs.

Reality check:

“User should be able to login.”

Cool. With what? Email? Magic incantations?
No mention of edge cases, roles, or even the fact that the button says “Sign In” on dev and “Get Started” on prod.

This is Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) in the trenches.

🧃 STLC Phase 2: Test Planning

“Risk analysis,” they said.

So you Google an STLC template and paste in a bunch of jargon. Meanwhile, the PM adds two new APIs mid-sprint.

Your test plan now has all the structure of a house built from cow dung in monsoon.

✍️ STLC Phase 3: Test Case Design

Writing maintainable test cases is an art.

Too bad your reference doc is TestCase_v2_FINAL_REVIEW_COPY(1)_REVISED.xlsx.

Also, BDD fans convinced you to write Given-When-Then for a toaster.

Pro tip: If you’re designing test cases and haven’t accounted for network latency, you’re just writing bedtime stories.

🔥 STLC Phase 4: Test Environment Setup

Oh, this one’s a peach 🍑.

Docker container fails.
QA DB drops overnight.
CI pipeline explodes because some genius used C:\path\to\tests in a Linux shell script.

And there’s no test data unless you count the 5-year-old XML dump from UAT.

Welcome to STLC Phase 4, where environments are made of Jenga blocks.

🧪 STLC Phase 5: Test Execution

Manual Testing? You actually find bugs.
Automation? Jenkins says “PASS.”
Reality? The login form wasn’t even rendered.

Our test passed because the test script only checked if the page title contained “Login”.

This test is about as useful as a biscuit in a biryani.

📦 STLC Phase 6: Test Closure

Nobody reads the Test Summary Report.
But it has pie charts. So… it’s fine?

Your actual contribution?

Logging 58 bugs
Getting 34 “Won’t Fix”
Watching 3 of them hit production anyway

Then you’re told to write lessons learned in Confluence, which no one will ever open again.

🧊 War Story: When Manual Testing Saved the Project (STLC at Its Best)

Back in 2013.
App built in Flash. Browser: IE9. Tech stack: Tears and duct tape.

I manually clicked the “Delete Account” button on mobile.
No warning popped.
Just boom — goodbye account.

Turns out the confirmation dialog was tied to a hover event. On a touchscreen.

That one manual test saved 4,000 users from digital vaporization.

That, friends, is why manual testing is still a crucial part of the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC).

🧱 Tool Debate: Selenium vs Playwright in STLC

Selenium is the old wizard.
Works everywhere. Creaks a little.

Playwright is the hotshot millennial. Fast, fancy, but won’t return your calls on legacy browsers.

Look — if your entire product is built with React and ships only to Chrome, sure, Playwright rocks.
But show me one Playwright script running on IE11 behind a VPN and—

Yeah, didn’t think so.

STLC needs reliable tools, not trendy ones.

🧂 Nostalgia Pain: Flash, jQuery & IE6 in the STLC

Remember testing Flash UIs with no inspect element?
Or when jQuery was a religion?

I once debugged a $(‘#login’).click() loop that triggered a popup every 200ms.
Browser melted like ghee in May.

STLC has come far. But never forget where it started — in the pits of browser compatibility hell.

😵 Breakdown Moment (Emotional Test Execution in STLC)

The automation suite passed 100%.
But prod was dead.
Auth token had expired, and the test only checked for any response, not a 200.

Green report.
Zero working features.

I stared at the logs for 4 hours.
Didn’t even blink.

sobs in silently skipped test cases

🧹 Tool Roast: TestNG XMLs in STLC

Ever seen a testng.xml with 6 suite tags, 12 listeners, and 3 parameter injections?

I have.
And I aged 5 years trying to parallelize it.

“Use Maven profiles,” they say.
I would, if I didn’t have PTSD from surefire plugin bugs in Java 11.

⚔️ CTA That Starts Fights

Stop blaming AI when your test locator is still //div[3]/table/tbody/tr[2]/td[5]/a.

You want better STLC results?
Write better test data, use modular scripts, and stop chasing buzzwords.

And no, AI-powered self-healing tests won’t save you from logic errors in your code.

📚 External Resources Worth Reading

🎯 Final Thoughts on the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC)

The Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) isn’t a clean set of boxes you tick off.
It’s a dirty, messy, glorious, soul-crushing part of software engineering.

And yet…

We do it.
Because sometimes — just sometimes — we catch the bug nobody else saw.

And for that one moment, we’re not just testers.
We’re the last line of defense.