In highly competitive manufacturing industries nowadays, the general manufacturing problem can be described as the achievement of a predefined product quality with given equipment, cost and time constraints. Unfortunately, for some quality characteristics of a product such as surface roughness it is hard to ensure that these requirements will be met. To achieve these goals, one of the considerations is by optimizing the machining parameters such as the cutting speed, depth of cut, feed rate. Recently, alternative to conventional techniques, evolutionary optimization techniques are the new trend for optimization of the machining parameters. The present work is an effort to review the literature on optimizing these machining parameters in turning processes. The objective of this review is to study the effect of cutting speed, feed, and depth of cut on surface roughness and cutting forces in dry, wet and MQL type turning by employing Taguchi optimization techniques. Present work concludes that Taguchi technique is widely used in optimizing the turning operation and MQL turning can be alternative to dry and wet turning.