QA Vocabulary

QA Vocabulary


There are lot of terms used in the industry and sometimes they are used invariably irrespective of the context.
There are a couple of time I have wondered if they are being used correctly. So, I thought it will be good to provide some insights.

Term	Definition/Meaning	Remarks
Baseline	Process of managing change, which can serve as a basis for logical comparison from initial state to next state and it can also serve as a basis for further subsequent activities.
Blocker	Blocks development, testing, or production - regardless of perceived severity
Critical	Crashes; loss of data; severe memory leak; errors that leave a machine unusable
Keywords	Keywords provide a way to group or filter the tests based on the type of tests like User-Interface, smoke, security, performance, Data-validation etc
Line Items	They are the requirement items for the project. Each line item will have priority, dev owner, QA owner, Target date, Status attributes associated along with the test scenarios
Major	Major loss of function.
Minor	Minor loss of function, or other problem where easy workaround is present; translation/string errors; major cosmetic problems
Scope	The work that needs to be accomplished to deliver a product, service, or result with the specified features and functions within the specified duration
Test	Test is a series of steps with multiple testcases that also includes unique identifier, requirement references from a design specification, preconditions, events, etc.
Test bed	Collection of all test-suites, test dataset, application environment, stubs and support tools.
Test case	A test case is condition with an input and an expected result to test a point of failure.
Test Condition	Derived by applying various methodologies like boundary value analysis, equivalence partitioning, state charts, decision trees, error guessing, sampling, combination matrix etc
Test Data	Data set derived and built to support the test-conditions and the scenarios for the application under test.
Test Scenario	Collection of Multiple tests for the use case under consideration
Test Script	It is a combination of a test case, logical code/procedure and test data, usually scripted for automated regression suites
Test step	Test step is an action to follow, input, output, expected result, and actual result
Test Suite	Collection of all test scenarios along with all the tests embedded with test data classified under each requirement item which also includes detailed instructions or goals for each collection of test cases. It may also contain prerequisite states.
Topology	Presents a pictorial scope of requirements under consideration for the current product/project/module in terms of (Product Area under Test, Module Name, Use Case, Scenarios) and the progress can be tracked for testcase, test data and environment with status codes as (Red – Not Started, Yellow – Under Review and Green – Complete). Used in the place of Traceability matrix
Trivial	Cosmetic problems like misspelled words or misaligned text.