Software Testing Glossary(with A&B)

• Acceptance criteria: The expected results or performance characteristics that define whether the test case passed or failed.
• Acceptance Testing / User Acceptance: Testing An acceptance test is a test that a user/sponsor and manufacturer/producer jointly perform on a finished, engineered product/system through black-box testing (i.e., the user or tester need not know anything about the internal workings of the system). It is often referred to as a(n) functional test, beta test, QA test, application test, confidence test, final test, or end user test .
• Accessibility Testing: Verifying a product is accessible to the people having disabilities (deaf, blind, mentally disabled etc.).
• Ad-hoc Testing: Testing carried out using no recognised test case design technique. It is also known as Exploratory Testing .
• Agile Testing: Testing practice for projects using agile methodologies, treating development as the customer of testing and emphasizing a test-first design paradigm .
• Alpha Testing: In software development, testing is usually required before release to the general public. This phase of development is known as the alpha phase. Testing during this phase is known as alpha testing. In the first phase of alpha testing, developers test the software using white box techniques. Additional inspection is then performed using black box or grey box techniques.
• Arc Testing / Branch Testing: A test case design technique for a component in which test cases are designed to execute branch outcomes. A test method satisfying coverage criteria that require that for each decision point, each possible branch be executed at least once.
• AUT: Application Under Test
• Authorization Testing: Involves testing the systems responsible for the initiation and maintenance of user sessions. This will require testing the Input validation of login fields ,Cookie security,and Lockout testing .This is performed to discover whether the login system can be forced into permitting unauthorised access. The testing will also reveal whether the system is susceptible to denial of service attacks using the same techniques.
• Back-to-back testing: Testing in which two or more variants of a component or system are executed with the same inputs, the outputs compared, and analyzed in cases of discrepancies
• Basis Path Testing: A white box test case design technique that uses the algorithmic flow of the program to design tests .
• Benchmark Testing: Tests that use representative sets of programs and data designed to evaluate the performance of computer hardware and software in a given configuration .
• Beta Testing / Field Testing: Once the alpha phase is complete, development enters the beta phase. Versions of the software, known as beta-versions, are released to a limited audience outside of the company to ensure that the product has few faults or bugs. Beta testing, is generally constrained to black box techniques although a core of test engineers are likely to continue with white box testing in parallel to the beta tests.
• Big Bang Testing: Integration testing where no incremental testing takes place prior to all the system's components being combined to form the system.
• Black Box Testing / Functional Testing: Black box testing, concrete box or functional testing is used to check that the outputs of a program, given certain inputs, conform to the functional specification of the program. It performs testing based on previously understood requirements (or understood functionality), without knowledge of how the code executes.
• Bottom-up Testing: An approach to integration testing where the lowest level components are tested first, then used to facilitate the testing of higher level components. The process is repeated until the component at the top of the hierarchy is tested.
• Boundary value analysis/ testing: A test case design technique for a component in which test cases are designed which include representatives of boundary values. A testing technique using input values at, just below, and just above, the defined limits of an input domain; and with input values causing outputs to be at, just below, and just above, the defined limits of an output domain.
• Breadth Testing: A test suite that exercises the full functionality of a product but does not test features in detail .
• Bug: Bugs arise from mistakes and errors, made by people, in either a program's source code or its design that prevents it from working correctly or produces an incorrect result .
• Business process-based testing: An approach to testing in which test cases are designed based on descriptions and/or knowledge of business processes