Software testing fundamentals

Terms in this topic

Acceptance testing

Acceptance testing is a level of testing that checks whether a system meets its acceptance criteria and its users' needs. It lets the system's users and owners decide whether to accept it.

Agentic testing

Agentic testing is software testing that AI agents carry out themselves, choosing, running, and judging checks on the software, rather than only writing test scripts for later.

End-to-end test

An end-to-end test is a test that follows a whole user journey through a running system, from the interface through services and data, the way a real user would.

Exploratory testing

Exploratory testing is a testing approach that designs and runs tests at the same time, guided by what the tester learns about the software while using it.

Integration test

An integration test is a test that checks that separate parts of a system work together, e.g. a service and its database, rather than each part alone.

Quality assurance (QA)

Quality assurance is a set of activities that aims to prevent defects by improving how a team builds and tests software. Testing, a form of quality control, checks the product itself.

Red-green-refactor

Red-green-refactor is the test-driven development cycle that writes a failing test, then the code that makes it pass, then cleans up the code while the test stays green.

Regression testing

Regression testing is a type of testing that checks that a change has not broken behavior that worked before, including parts of the software the change did not touch.

Sanity testing

Sanity testing is a quick, narrow check that a specific fix or change behaves sensibly before deeper testing, often used interchangeably with smoke testing.

Smoke test

A smoke test is a quick, shallow test that a build starts and its most basic functions work, run before deeper testing is worth the time.

Snapshot test

A snapshot test is a test that saves a program's output once and fails when later output differs, until someone reviews and approves the new output.

Software regression

A software regression is a defect in which something that worked before a change stops working after it, often in a part of the code the change did not touch.

Software testing

Software testing is the practice that runs or examines a program to find differences between what it does and what it should do, before users find them.

System under test

The system under test is the part of the software that a test exercises and checks, as opposed to the harness around it, including its test doubles.

Test automation

Test automation is the use of software to run tests and compare actual results with expected results, so the same checks can repeat without a person doing each step.

Test charter

A test charter is a short mission statement for an exploratory testing session that names the area to explore, the risks to look for, and a time box.

Test double

A test double is a stand-in for a real component that a test uses in its place. Stubs return canned answers, and mocks also check that they were called as expected.

Test harness

A test harness is the set of code and tools that runs tests against a system, including drivers that start it, test doubles for its dependencies, and checks on the results.

Test pyramid

The test pyramid is a model of a test suite that has many fast unit tests at the base and fewer integration tests in the middle. A few end-to-end tests sit at the top.

Test-driven development (TDD)

Test-driven development is a practice that writes a failing test before the code, then only enough code to pass it, then refactors, in small repeated cycles.

Unit test

A unit test is a test that checks the smallest testable part of a program, e.g. one function, in isolation from the rest of the system.

User journey test

A user journey test is a test that follows one complete task a user performs, e.g. signing up, from start to finish through the running software, and checks each step.

22 terms from the Learning Center glossary.