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.
In software engineering, code coverage, also called test coverage, is a percentage measure of the degree to which the source code of a program is executed when a particular test suite is run. A program with high test coverage has more of its source code executed during testing, which suggests it has a lower chance of containing undetected software bugs compared to a program with low test coverage. Many different metrics can be used to calculate test coverage. Some of the most basic are the percentage of program subroutines and the percentage of program statements called during execution of the test suite.
Software testing is the act of checking whether software satisfies expectations.
Regression testing is re-running functional and non-functional tests to ensure that previously developed and tested software still performs as expected after a change. If not, that would be called a regression.
In software quality assurance, performance testing is in general a testing practice performed to determine how a system performs in terms of responsiveness and stability under a particular workload. It can also serve to investigate, measure, validate or verify other quality attributes of the system, such as scalability, reliability and resource usage.
In software engineering and computer science, abstraction is the process of generalizing concrete details, such as attributes, away from the study of objects and systems to focus attention on details of greater importance. Abstraction is a fundamental concept in computer science and software engineering, especially within the object-oriented programming paradigm. Examples of this include:
Black-box testing, sometimes referred to as specification-based testing, is a method of software testing that examines the functionality of an application without peering into its internal structures or workings. This method of test can be applied virtually to every level of software testing: unit, integration, system and acceptance. Black-box testing is also used as a method in penetration testing, where an ethical hacker simulates an external hacking or cyber warfare attack with no knowledge of the system being attacked.
In software and systems engineering, the phrase use case is a polyseme with two senses:
- A usage scenario for a piece of software; often used in the plural to suggest situations where a piece of software may be useful.
- A potential scenario in which a system receives an external request and responds to it.
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.
White-box testing is a method of software testing that tests internal structures or workings of an application, as opposed to its functionality. In white-box testing, an internal perspective of the system is used to design test cases. The tester chooses inputs to exercise paths through the code and determine the expected outputs. This is analogous to testing nodes in a circuit, e.g. in-circuit testing (ICT). White-box testing can be applied at the unit, integration and system levels of the software testing process. Although traditional testers tended to think of white-box testing as being done at the unit level, it is used for integration and system testing more frequently today. It can test paths within a unit, paths between units during integration, and between subsystems during a system–level test. Though this method of test design can uncover many errors or problems, it has the potential to miss unimplemented parts of the specification or missing requirements. Where white-box testing is design-driven, that is, driven exclusively by agreed specifications of how each component of software is required to behave, white-box test techniques can accomplish assessment for unimplemented or missing 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.
Model-based testing is an application of model-based design for designing and optionally also executing artifacts to perform software testing or system testing. Models can be used to represent the desired behavior of a system under test (SUT), or to represent testing strategies and a test environment. The picture on the right depicts the former approach.
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.
Behavior-driven development (BDD) involves naming software tests using domain language to describe the behavior of the code.
Keyword-driven testing, also known as action word based testing, is a software testing methodology suitable for both manual and automated testing. This method separates the documentation of test cases – including both the data and functionality to use – from the prescription of the way the test cases are executed. As a result, it separates the test creation process into two distinct stages: a design and development stage, and an execution stage. The design substage covers the requirement analysis and assessment and the data analysis, definition, and population.
In software development, the V-model represents a development process that may be considered an extension of the waterfall model and is an example of the more general V-model. Instead of moving down linearly, the process steps are bent upwards after the coding phase, to form the typical V shape. The V-Model demonstrates the relationships between each phase of the development life cycle and its associated phase of testing. The horizontal and vertical axes represent time or project completeness (left-to-right) and level of abstraction, respectively.
In software testing, a test oracle is a provider of information that describes correct output based on the input of a test case. Testing with an oracle involves comparing actual results of the system under test (SUT) with the expected results as provided by the oracle.
iSCSI conformance testing is testing to determine whether an iSCSI Initiator/Target meets the iSCSI standard.
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.
