If you don’t work in QA, it can be difficult to keep track of all the lingo. (Even if you do work in QA, it’s not always easy!) So we put together a handy primer on QA testing vocabulary. After all, everyone has to start somewhere, and a good team will never make you feel embarrassed to ask questions.
While this list may not help you win your next Scrabble tournament, it should help give you a basic understanding of common QA testing vocabulary.
Types of QA Testing Vocabulary
Manual Testing means testing the app or site by hand. For example, opening a browser and manually navigating to different sections of a website, looking for user experience issues or bugs. (For more, see What is Manual Testing?)
Automated Testing means using a programming language (such as Java) to write scripts that will navigate a website or app. These scripts can generate reports for issues such as broken links, missing text, etc. (For more on the differences between manual and automated, see Manual vs. Automated Testing.)
API Testing means checking the quality/accuracy of an API, which stands for Application Programming Interface. APIs send requests and responses to/from remote servers.
For example, say that you type in text and click “Search” on Google.com. The search engine API then sends the content request, and returns the search results.
Performance Testing involves checking the response time for an application or website in typical usage scenarios.
For example, let’s say that you know that your website gets 50,000 hits on a normal day. With performance testing, you could use a program to see how many seconds it would take to load in that scenario.
Load Testing is very similar to performance testing, but with even more of a focus on finding the exact point at which an app or site would crash or go down. Continue reading →