Smoke testing is one of the most common terms in a QA vocabulary. It involves doing light (and often ad-hoc) tests of major features, typically right before or after a release. While smoke testing is one of the quickest and most basic forms of QA testing, it’s also one of the most important when time is tight.

To understand the purpose, it can be helpful to think of the phrase, “when there’s smoke, there’s fire.” A big part of smoke testing is keeping an eye out for red flags, which could indicate other instabilities in the software.

Smoke Testing Examples

Ideally, a mobile app or website will have also gone through more rigorous testing in other QA phases. But smoke testing is used as a back-up, to be extra cautious, or when there’s not enough time for the ideal level of QA testing.

For example, say that you’re about to launch a new version of an app. It already passed QA, but you want some quick last-minute testing done before you publish to the App Store, just to be safe. If you ask QA to smoke test the login feature, they might check that logging in with valid credentials works. They would also likely verify that attempting to log in with an incorrect password brings up an error message.

However, with smoke testing, QA would not be nearly as thorough as other types of testing. Regression testing, on the other hand, would likely incorporate testing case sensitivity, switching between different users, etc. (Learn more about how to do regression testing.) Continue reading →

User experience. You’ve probably heard the term many times, but it’s often used in different ways. Whether you’ve worked in tech for 20 years or just downloaded your first mobile app, user experience (or “UX”) can have a big impact on your day-to-day life. Let’s talk about what exactly “user experience” is, with some real world examples.

What is user experience? It’s actually pretty simple:

The overall experience of a person using a website or app, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.

As you may have guessed, some aspects of user experience can be subjective. Maybe you think hamburger menu icons are elegant and helpful, while others find them inconvenient. Perhaps you find it annoying when sites require complex passwords, while others might appreciate the added security. Continue reading →

SEO is not usually associated with QA testing. In fact, at most companies, SEO analysts and QA testers work completely separately in different departments. While we’re not advocating for QA testers to replace SEO specialists, it can be extremely beneficial for QA to learn the basics of SEO — and incorporate this knowledge when testing websites.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. In a nutshell, the purpose of SEO is to have your website page(s) rank as highly as possible in search engine results.

For example, say that you have an e-commerce site that sells Lady Gaga merchandise. Ideally, if someone Googles “Lady Gaga t-shirt,” your page would be the first result. (Just make sure you’re not sold out — Lady Gaga fans don’t mess around.)

There are a number of strategies for achieving higher ranking with SEO. Some of these include:

Writing quality content that’s appealing to read. This will result in more traffic (people love sharing!). It will also result in more time spent on the page (which search engines take into account, referred to as “bounce rate”). Continue reading →

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 →