In engineering and its various subdisciplines, acceptance testing is a test conducted to determine if the requirements of a specification or contract are met. It may involve chemical tests, physical tests, or performance tests.
Software testing is the act of checking whether software satisfies expectations.
Unit testing, a.k.a. component or module testing, is a form of software testing by which isolated source code is tested to validate expected behavior.
In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics. Formal verification is a key incentive for formal specification of systems, and is at the core of formal methods. It represents an important dimension of analysis and verification in electronic design automation and is one approach to software verification. The use of formal verification enables the highest Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL7) in the framework of common criteria for computer security certification.
Test-driven development (TDD) is a way of writing code that involves writing an automated unit-level test case that fails, then writing just enough code to make the test pass, then refactoring both the test code and the production code, then repeating with another new test case.
Software verification is a discipline of software engineering, programming languages, and theory of computation whose goal is to assure that software satisfies the expected requirements.
In software project management, software testing, and software engineering, verification and validation is the process of checking that a software engineer system meets specifications and requirements so that it fulfills its intended purpose. It may also be referred to as software quality control. It is normally the responsibility of software testers as part of the software development lifecycle. In simple terms, software verification is: "Assuming we should build X, does our software achieve its goals without any bugs or gaps?" On the other hand, software validation is: "Was X what we should have built? Does X meet the high-level requirements?"
In software testing, test automation is the use of software separate from the software being tested to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with predicted outcomes. Test automation can automate some repetitive but necessary tasks in a formalized testing process already in place, or perform additional testing that would be difficult to do manually. Test automation is critical for continuous delivery and continuous testing.
In software engineering, a test case is a specification of the inputs, execution conditions, testing procedure, and expected results that define a single test to be executed to achieve a particular software testing objective, such as to exercise a particular program path or to verify compliance with a specific requirement. Test cases underlie testing that is methodical rather than haphazard. A battery of test cases can be built to produce the desired coverage of the software being tested. Formally defined test cases allow the same tests to be run repeatedly against successive versions of the software, allowing for effective and consistent regression testing.
ISO/IEC 9126Software engineering — Product quality was an international standard for the evaluation of software quality. It has been replaced by ISO/IEC 25010:2011.
Software quality assurance (SQA) is a means and practice of monitoring all software engineering processes, methods, and work products to ensure compliance against defined standards. It may include ensuring conformance to standards or models, such as ISO/IEC 9126, SPICE or CMMI.
Software assurance (SwA) is a critical process in software development that ensures the reliability, safety, and security of software products. It involves a variety of activities, including requirements analysis, design reviews, code inspections, testing, and formal verification. One crucial component of software assurance is secure coding practices, which follow industry-accepted standards and best practices, such as those outlined by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in their CERT Secure Coding Standards (SCS).
In software engineering, software system safety optimizes system safety in the design, development, use, and maintenance of software systems and their integration with safety-critical hardware systems in an operational environment.
The function point is a "unit of measurement" to express the amount of business functionality an information system provides to a user. Function points are used to compute a functional size measurement (FSM) of software. The cost of a single unit is calculated from past projects.
A functional specification in systems engineering and software development is a document that specifies the functions that a system or component must perform.
Verification and validation are independent procedures that are used together for checking that a product, service, or system meets requirements and specifications and that it fulfills its intended purpose. These are critical components of a quality management system such as ISO 9000. The words "verification" and "validation" are sometimes preceded with "independent", indicating that the verification and validation is to be performed by a disinterested third party. "Independent verification and validation" can be abbreviated as "IV&V".
Software quality control is the set of procedures used by organizations to ensure that a software product will meet its quality goals at the best value to the customer, and to continually improve the organization’s ability to produce software products in the future.
Parasoft C/C++test is an integrated set of tools for testing C and C++ source code that software developers use to analyze, test, find defects, and measure the quality and security of their applications. It supports software development practices that are part of development testing, including static code analysis, dynamic code analysis, unit test case generation and execution, code coverage analysis, regression testing, runtime error detection, requirements traceability, and code review. It's a commercial tool that supports operation on Linux, Windows, and Solaris platforms as well as support for on-target embedded testing and cross compilers.
In computer programming and software testing, smoke testing is preliminary testing or sanity testing to reveal simple failures severe enough to, for example, reject a prospective software release. Smoke tests are a subset of test cases that cover the most important functionality of a component or system, used to aid assessment of whether main functions of the software appear to work correctly. When used to determine if a computer program should be subjected to further, more fine-grained testing, a smoke test may be called a pretest or an intake test. Alternatively, it is a set of tests run on each new build of a product to verify that the build is testable before the build is released into the hands of the test team. In the DevOps paradigm, use of a build verification test step is one hallmark of the continuous integration maturity stage.
This article discusses a set of tactics useful in software testing. It is intended as a comprehensive list of tactical approaches to Software Quality Assurance (more widely colloquially known as Quality Assurance and general application of the test method.
