Software testing is the act of examining the artifacts and the behavior of the software under test by validation and verification. Software testing can also provide an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to appreciate and understand the risks of software implementation. Test techniques include, but are not necessarily limited to:
Configuration management (CM) is a process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. The CM process is widely used by military engineering organizations to manage changes throughout the system lifecycle of complex systems, such as weapon systems, military vehicles, and information systems. Outside the military, the CM process is also used with IT service management as defined by ITIL, and with other domain models in the civil engineering and other industrial engineering segments such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, and buildings.
Software architecture is the set of structures needed to reason about a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements and relations.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to software engineering:
In product development and process optimization, a requirement is a singular documented physical or functional need that a particular design, product or process aims to satisfy. It is commonly used in a formal sense in engineering design, including for example in systems engineering, software engineering, or enterprise engineering. It is a broad concept that could speak to any necessary function, attribute, capability, characteristic, or quality of a system for it to have value and utility to a customer, organization, internal user, or other stakeholder. Requirements can come with different levels of specificity; for example, a requirement specification or requirement "spec" refers to an explicit, highly objective/clear requirement to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service.
In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. By consequence, it is also applied in the field of software design where services are provided to the other components by application components, through a communication protocol over a network. A service is a discrete unit of functionality that can be accessed remotely and acted upon and updated independently, such as retrieving a credit card statement online. SOA is also intended to be independent of vendors, products and technologies.
A TPS report is a document used by a quality assurance group or individual, particularly in software engineering, that describes the testing procedures and the testing process.
Release notes are documents that are distributed with software products or hardware products, sometimes when the product is still in the development or test state. For products that have already been in use by clients, the release note is delivered to the customer when an update is released. Another abbreviation for Release notes is Changelog or Release logs or Software changes or Revision historyUpdates or README file. However, in some cases, the release notes and changelog are published separately. This split is for clarity and differentiation of feature-highlights from bugs, change requests (CRs) or improvements on the other side.
Edward Nash Yourdon was an American software engineer, computer consultant, author and lecturer, and software engineering methodology pioneer. He was one of the lead developers of the structured analysis techniques of the 1970s and a co-developer of both the Yourdon/Whitehead method for object-oriented analysis/design in the late 1980s and the Coad/Yourdon methodology for object-oriented analysis/design in the 1990s.
A test plan is a document detailing the objectives, resources, and processes for a specific test for a software or hardware product. The plan typically contains a detailed understanding of the eventual workflow.
Architecture description languages (ADLs) are used in several disciplines: system engineering, software engineering, and enterprise modelling and engineering.
Structured analysis and design technique (SADT) is a systems engineering and software engineering methodology for describing systems as a hierarchy of functions. SADT is a structured analysis modelling language, which uses two types of diagrams: activity models and data models. It was developed in the late 1960s by Douglas T. Ross, and was formalized and published as IDEF0 in 1981.
In software engineering, structured analysis (SA) and structured design (SD) are methods for analyzing business requirements and developing specifications for converting practices into computer programs, hardware configurations, and related manual procedures.
ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010Systems and software engineering — Architecture description is an international standard for architecture descriptions of systems and software.
Winston Walker Royce was an American computer scientist, director at Lockheed Software Technology Center in Austin, Texas. He was a pioneer in the field of software development, known for his 1970 paper from which the Waterfall model for software development was mistakenly drawn.
Dr. William C. Hetzel is an expert in the field of software testing. He compiled the papers from the 1972 Computer Program Test Methods Symposium, also known as the Chapel Hill Symposium, into the book Program Test Methods. The book, published in 1973, details the problems of software validation and testing.
In software, the term feature has several definitions, which are often distinct from the more general definitions of the term. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) defines the term in IEEE 829 as a "distinguishing characteristic of a software item ".
ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119Software and systems engineering -- Software testing is a series of five international standards for software testing. First developed in 2007 and released in 2013, the standard "defines vocabulary, processes, documentation, techniques, and a process assessment model for testing that can be used within any software development lifecycle."
TechWell Corporation, was founded in 1986 by Bill Hetzel and David Gelperin as a consulting company to help organizations improve their software testing practices and produce higher quality software.
