Interview Questions, Answers and Tutorials

Month: September 2012

Software Testing Dictionary – 10

Table testing. Test access, security, and data integrity of table entries. [William E. Lewis, 2000]   Test Bed. An environment containing the hardware, instrumentation, simulators, software tools, and other support elements needed to conduct a test [IEEE 610].   Test Case. A set of test inputs, executions, and expected results developed for a particular objective.   Test conditions. The set of circumstances that a test invokes. [Daniel J. Mosley, 2002]   Test Coverage The degree to which a given test or set of tests addresses all specified test cases for a given system or component.   Test Criteria. Decision rules…

Software Testing Dictionary – 11

Unit Testing. Testing performed to isolate and expose faults and failures as soon as the source code is available, regardless of the external interfaces that may be required. Oftentimes, the detailed design and requirements documents are used as a basis to compare how and what the unit is able to perform. White and black-box testing methods are combined during unit testing.   Usability testing.Testing for ‘user-friendliness. Clearly, this is subjective and will depend on the targeted end-user or customer. Validation. The comparison between the actual characteristics of something (e.g. a product of a software project and the expected characteristics). Validation…

Software Testing Dictionary – 9

Sanity Testing – typically an initial testing effort to determine if a new software version is performing well enough to accept it for a major testing effort. For example, if the new software is often crashing systems, bogging down systems to a crawl, or destroying databases, the software may not be in a ‘sane’ enough condition to warrant further testing in its current state.   Scalability testing is a subtype of performance test where performance requirements for response time, throughput, and/or utilization are tested as the load on the SUT is increased over time. [Load Testing Terminology by Scott Stirling ]…

Software Testing Dictionary – 8

Race condition defect. Many concurrent defects result from data-race conditions. A data-race condition may be defined as two accesses to a shared variable, at least one of which is a write, with no mechanism used by either to prevent simultaneous access. However, not all race conditions are defects.   Recovery testing how well a system recovers from crashes, hardware failures, or other catastrophic problems.   Regression Testing.Testing conducted for the purpose of evaluating whether or not a change to the system (all CM items) has introduced a new failure. Regression testing is often accomplished through the construction, execution, and analysis…

Software Testing Dictionary – 7

  Negative test. A test whose primary purpose is falsification; that is tests designed to break the software[B.Beizer1995]     Orthogonal array testing: Technique can be used to reduce the number of combinations and provide maximum coverage with a minimum number of TC. Pay attention to the fact that it is an old and proven technique. The OAT was introduced for the first time by Plackett and Burman in 1946 and was implemented by G. Taguchi, 1987   Orthogonal array testing: Mathematical technique to determine which variations of parameters need to be tested. [William E. Lewis, 2000]   Oracle. Test…