QA Glossary

Alpha Alpha is the test period during which the product is complete and usable in a test environment but not necessarily bug-free. It is the final chance to get verification from customers that the tradeoffs made in the final development stage are coherent.

anchor The location of a hyperlink in a document. It can be used to describe the link as it appears in text or graphics as well as the place that the link references.

API Application Program Interface. A set of functions that provide application programmers with access to the full functionality of a product.

ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. The modern version uses seven bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including an early version of ASCII) used fewer. The change to seven bits allowed the inclusion of lowercase letters - a major win - but it did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as the German sharp-S or the ae-ligature which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian).

Automation The process of writing a set of instructions that are designed, scripted, tested, and checked in by a person, then executed by a machine, to produce results that can be analyzed.

Beta Beta is the test period during which the product should be of "FCS quality" (it is complete and usable in a production environment). The purpose of the Beta ship and test period is to test the company's ability to deliver and support the product (and not to test the product itself). Beta also serves as a chance to get a final "vote of confidence" from a few customers to help validate our own belief that the product is now ready for volume shipment to all customers.

bug An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, especially one that causes it to malfunction.

bug fix A change to a program or system intended to permanently cure a bug. Often a fix for one bug inadvertently introduces new bugs, hence the need for careful forethought and testing.

feature An intended property or behavior (as of a program).

First Customer Ship (FCS) FCS is the period which signifies entry into the final phase of a project. At this point, the product is considered wholly complete and ready for purchase and usage by the customers.

Functional Freeze (FF) A release reaches the Functionality Freeze milestone when the x-functional team gives the approval that the entry criteria for FF has been met. Development releases a build to QA for testing and verification against the entry criteria. All Must/Hopefully features to be included in the release will have been implemented and the functionality of each feature has been either presented in a meeting or documented.

Hand-off to QA (HQA) Development releases a build (final drop) to QA for verification against milestone entry criteria of a particular segment. These builds include the latest drafts of the online help and the HTML manuals and help.

Localization Final adaptation of an internationalized software to a specific locale. This usually requires specification of which of the broad range of capabilities of the internationalized software are used, as well as implementing of strings in the locale language.

Object A defined Windows control, such as a window, dialog box, check box, label, grid, radio button, or command button. Applications may also contain custom objects that conform to Windows object programming standards.

Product Life Cycle The phases a software product goes through (from conception to release). The development process tends to run interactively through these phases rather than linearly. Click to see chart...

Product Teams Each product, has a Product Team. The product team is a group of representatives for different company organizations. A typical make up would be a Product Manager, typically one of the engineering managers; a development engineer, a QA engineer; a Pubs engineer; a Support representative; a Marketing representative; and an Ops representative. Some Product Teams have more than one representative from each group,and others might not have full participation from all company organizations.
property An attribute that is defined. For example, the properties of a field include its data type, physical characteristics such as length, and whether it is required or optional.

project A user defined software test effort. Projects contain the specific test plans, test procedures, test cases, defect information, test schedule information, and performance data used to test software applications and track results.

QA A.K.A. Quality Assurance. Also known as Software Test. This is the group that performs methodical testing of the products developed by engineering. They make no statement of the quality of the product and no guaranty of finding all the bugs in a product. Their job is to take an independent approach to evaluating the product and open bugs against anything they think is broken or not performing as a reasonable end user might expect.

quality The totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs. Not to be mistaken for "degree of excellence" or "fitness for use" which meet only part of the definition.

release Second digit in a product number. ( this number changes in a minor or dot release) A change in the release number signifies a Minor release, with minor additional functionality change. Maintenance releases (bug fix releases)also fit into this category. A Minor release may or may not ship to all supported customers. (e.g. 2.1 to 2.2)

repository The component for storing software testing project information about test planning, test execution, and defect tracking.

request A collection of information that describes an event (transaction), such as a problem or a service request.

revision Third digit in a product number (dot dot release). A change in the revision happens whenever the shipping product rev. Product may be rev for a specific bug fix or to fix some port related issues.(e.g. 2.1.3 to 2.1.4) No new functionality is added in a revision release. Revision releases are not proactively shipped to customers on support.

script A file of commands that represent the recorded actions of a test procedure.

shipping version a.k.a shipping release What is available for shipping to customer. This number is reported to the third digit (i.e. 2.1.3) This should be available as shared internal information.

test The process of exercising a product to identify differences between expected and actual behavior.

Test Assets Types of resources for testing projects: test plans, test procedures, test cases, test requirement hierarchies, and software structure hierarchies.

Test Case A verification point in a test procedure that shows whether or not a test requirement has been met.

Test Cycle A test cycle will consist of the following tasks; regression, execution of functionality & workflow tests and documentation review. It is estimated that a test cycle can be completed in five working days. This does not mean that all regressions, or all functionality and workflow testing will be performed for every cycle. It is the responsibility of the QA Lead and Team to ensure that the appropriate test coverage is provided in order to meet all milestones. Testing software usually requires a cycle of tests on each new build of the app-under-test.

Test Log A record of events that occur during playback of a test procedure.

Test Procedure A specific sequence of steps in the app-under-test that are required to execute a single test case or series of test cases.

Test Requirement An operation, property, or behavioral characteristic of the app-under-test that must be verified.

Transfer of Information (TOI) An in-depth presentation, encompassing new features, troubleshooting, or other pertinent topics of a current project.

Usability The effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which specified users can achieve specified goals in a particular environment. Synonymous with "ease of use".

version First digit in a product number (this number always changes in a major release). A change in the version number signifies a Major release, introducing significant new functionality. All supported customers will be shipped (or notified of) a major release. (e.g. 2.0 to 3.0)