Software Test Management involves a set of activities for managing a software testing cycle. It is the practice of organizing and controlling the process and activities required for the testing effort.

Some of the goals of Software Test Management are plan, develop, execute, and assess all testing activities within the application/product development. This includes coordinating the efforts of all those involved in the testing cycle, tracking dependencies and relationships among test assets and, most importantly, defining, measuring, and tracking quality goals.

Software Test Management can be broken into different phases: organization, planning, authoring, execution, and reporting.

Test artifact and resource organization is a clearly necessary part of test management. This requires organizing and maintaining an inventory of items to test, along with the various things used to perform the testing. This addresses how teams track dependencies and relationships among test assets. The most common types of test assets that need to be managed are:

* Test scripts
* Test data
* Test software
* Test hardware

Test planning is the overall set of tasks that address the questions of why, what, where, and when to test. The reason why a given test is created is called a test motivator (for example, a specific requirement must be validated). What should be tested is broken down into many test cases for a project. Where to test is answered by determining and documenting the needed software and hardware configurations. When to test is resolved by tracking iterations (or cycles, or time period) to the testing.

Test authoring is a process of capturing the specific steps required to complete a given test. This addresses the question of how something will be tested. This is where somewhat abstract test cases are developed into more detailed test steps, which in turn will become test scripts (either manual or automated).

Test execution entails running the tests by assembling sequences of test scripts into a suite of tests. This is a continuation of answering the question of how something will be tested (more specifically, how the testing will be conducted).

Test reporting is how the various results of the testing effort are analyzed and communicated. This is used to determine the current status of project testing, as well as the overall level of quality of the application or system.

The testing effort will produce a great deal of information. From this information, metrics can be extracted that define, measure, and track quality goals for the project. These quality metrics then need to be passed to whatever communication mechanism is used for the rest of the project metrics.

A very common type of data produced by testing, one which is often a source for quality metrics, is defects. Defects are not static, but change over time. In addition, multiple defects are often related to one another. Effective defect tracking is crucial to both testing and development teams.