STLC and Testing Terminology

Testing Life Cycle:

Determine the set of activities performed by tester for testing the software the product life cycle.

Software testing life cycle contains following activities’.

1. Test Plan Preparation

2. Test Specification preparation

3. Test Execution

4. Defect Reporting and Tracking

Test Drive: A program or test tool used to execute a test. Also know as Test Harness.

Test Environment: The hardware and software environment in which test will be run and any other software with which the software under test interacts.

Test Procedure: A document providing detailed instruction for the execution of one or more test cases.

Test Scripts: Commonly used to refer to the instruction for a particular test that will be carried out by an automated test tool.

Test Suite: A collection of tests used to validate the behavior of a product.

Test Scenario: TS is a set of action or test cases executed in sequence which represents a business operation.

Top down Testing: An approach to integration testing where the components at the top of the components hierarchy is tested first with lower level components being simulated by stubs. Tested components one then used to test lower level component. The process is repeated until the lowest level components have been tested.

Traceability Matrix: A document showing the relation-ship between requirement and test cases.

Test Bed: An execution environment configuration for testing may consists of specific hardware such as OS, Network topology, Configuration of the product under test, other application or system software etc. The test plan for a project should numerate the test bed(s) to be used.

Testability: The degree to which a system or component facilities the establishment of test criteria and the performance of test to determine whether those criteria have been met.

Baseline: The point at which some deliverable produced during the software engineering process is put under formal change control.

Functional Decomposition: A technique used during planning, analysis, and design; create a function hierarchy for the software.

Functional Specification: A document that describe in detail the characteristics of the product with regard to its intended features.

System/workflow Testing: Testing the entire project by simulating the real business operation performed by the end user.

Code coverage: An analysis method that determine which part of the software have been executed (covered) by the test case suite and which part have not been executed and therefore may requires additional attention.

Code Complete:  Phase of development when functionality is implemented in entirely bug fixes is all that are left. All functional found in the functional specifications have been implemented.

Benchmark Testing: Test that user represents sets of a program and data designed to evaluate the performance of computer hardware and software in a given configuration.

Test Case: which stimulated the particular action?

Cyclomatic Complexity:  A measure of the logical complexity of an algorithm used in white-box testing.

Data Flow diagram:  A modeling notation that represents a functional decomposition of a system.

Quality Policy:  The overall intension and direction of an organization as regards quality as formally expressed by top management.

Release Candidate: A pre-release version which contains the desired functionality of the final version, but which needs to be tested for bugs (which ideally should be removed before the final version is released).

Walkthrough: A review of requirement design or create characterized by the author of the material under review guiding the progression of the review.

Code Inspection: A formal testing (formal meeting) technique, when the programmer reviews source code with a group who ask question analyzing the program logic, analyzing the code with respect to a checklist of historically common programming errors, and analyzing its compliance with coding standards.

Code Walkthrough: A formal testing technique, when source code is tested by group with a small set of test cases, while the state of program variable is manually monitored to analyze the program logic and assumption

Quality Analysis: is an activity which establishes and evaluates the process which produces the product.

Quality Control: is an activity which verifies whether or not the product meets standards.

Product: includes the software associate data, documentation and all supporting and reporting paper work.

Process: includes all the activities involved in designing development enhancing and maintaining software.

Test Strategy: it describes the general objective of test activates. Test Strategy is the heart of the test plan. It control what testing are we conducting? How frequently are we conducting the testing, are we planning to automate the testing? On what operating system are we testing?

Test Plan: it is strategic document which describes how to perform testing on an application in an effective, efficient and optimized way. It contain sections like test strategy, test resource, test environment and test deliverable risk analysis.

Test process: Test process starts from the requirement stage itself which is called static testing. The whole process from the identification of the bug to its fixing is test process.

Use case: is documentation is derived from the SRS which helps in writing the code and test cases. It contains the step by step approach of the user on the application. Test cases can be created for normal course, exceptional course which are describe as use case.

Extreme Programming: is a software development approach for small team on risk prone project with unstable requirement. Programmers are expected to write unit and functional test code first before the application is developed. Test code is under source control along with the rest of the code.

High Level Design: HLD gives the overall system design in term of functional architecture and data base design. This is very useful for the development to understand the flow of the system. For this the entry criteria are the requirement document. And the exits criteria will the HDD, project standards, the functional design document and the database design document.

Low Level Design:  During the detailed phase, the view of the application developed during the high level design is broken down into modules and programs logic design is done for every program and then documented as program specifications. For every program a unit test plan is created.

The entry criteria for this will be the HLD document, and the exit criteria will be program specification and unit test plan (LLD).