A

A B C D E F G

Acceptance Testing: Formal testing conducted to enable a user, customer, or other authorized entity to determine whether to accept a system or component. Normally performed to validate the software meets a set of agreed acceptance criteria.

Accessibility Testing: Verfiying a product is accessible to the people having disabilities (visually impaired, hard of hearing etc.)

Actual Outcome: The actions that are produced when the object is tested under specific conditions.

Ad Hoc Testing: Testing carried out in an unstructured and improvised fashion. Performed without clear expected results, ad hoc testing is most often used as a compliment to other types of testing. See also Monkey Testing.

Alpha Testing: Simulated or actual operational testing by potential users/customers or an independent test team at the developers site. Alpha testing is often employed for off-the-shelf software as a form of internal acceptance testing, before the software goes to Beta Testing.

Arc Testing: See Branch Testing.

Agile Testing: Testing practice for projects using agile methodologies, treating developement as the customer of testing and emphasizing a test-first design philosophy. In agile developement testing is integrated throughout the lifecycle, testing the software throughout its developement. See also Test Driven Development.

Application Binary Interface (ABI): Describes the lowlevel interface between an application program and the operating system, between application and its libraries, or between component parts of the application. An ABI differs from an application programming interface (API) in that an API defines the interface between souce code and libraries, so that the same source code will compile on any system supporting that API, whereas an ABI allows compiled object code to function without changes on any system using a compatible ABI.

Application Development Lifecycle: The process flow during the various phases of the application development life cycle.

The Design Phase depicts the design phase up to the point of starting development. Once all of the requirements have been gathered, analyzed, verified, and a design has been produced, we are ready to pass on the programming requirements to the application programmers.
The programmers take the design documents (programming requirements) and then proceed with the iterative process of coding, testing, revising, and testing again, this is the Development Phase.

After the programs have been tested by the programmers, they will be part of a series of formal user and system tests. These are used to verify usability and functionality from a user point of view, as well as to verify the functions of the application within a large framework.

The final phase in the developement life cycle is to go to production and become a steady state. As a prerequisite to going to production, the developement team needs to provide documentation. This usually consists of user familiarizes the users with the new application. The operational procedures documentation enables Operations to take over responsibility for running the application on an ongoing bases.

In production, the changes and enhancement are handled by agroup (possible the same programming group) that performs the maintenance. At this point in the life cycle of the application, changes are tightly controlled and must be rigorously tested before being implemented into production.

Application Programming Interface (API): Provided by operating systems or libraries in response to support requests for services to be made of it by computer programs.

Automated Software Quality (ASQ): The use of software tools, such as automated testing tools, to improve software quality.

Automated Software Quality (ASQ): The use of software tools, such as automated testing tools, to improve software quality.

Automated Software Testing: The use of software to control the execution of tests, the comparison of actual outcomes to predicted outcomes, the setting up of test preconditions and other test control and test reporting functions, without manual intervention.

Automated Testing Tools: Software tools used by development teams to automate and streamline their testing and quality assurance process.