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Welcome to SQA, user5440. "High level software QA" could refer to a architect-level position, or a management position, or something else; maybe even a job testing zeppelin software, or testing marijuana distribution software in California. Or it might mean ordinary testing from the perspective of someone who doesn't know anything about software, or who ...

This is a terminology issue: what Beatty is saying is that conventional testing methods are unable to detect those conditions. Essentially, they don't manifest in typical testing activities (and detection requires detailed analysis of the code base by someone with access to and knowledge of the code - which many testers lack). Certainly in my career I've ...

I live this scenario. My employer's software has somewhere north of 1000 configuration flags, some with minor effects and others with the ability to dramatically change the system behavior. They support defining some 15 different kinds of item for sale, each with different rules of operation, 8 tax definitions (each of which can be defined in one of four ...

Pre-beta sounds like a non-standard term that people are inventing. The common term for pre-beta is an alpha release, hence beta being the greek alphabet letter that comes after alpha. Microsoft use the term "Technology Preview" that essentially means not of beta quality and features may change but hey, have a look and tell us what you think.

It is often risky and problematic to test the integration between your system and external systems that you do not control. For example, if your system performs financial transactions, it is daunting to test whether you perform those transactions correctly. Sometimes there are "test" versions of the external systems available for integration testing. If ...

BETA releases generally refer to full functionality and minor-no bugs expected. Pre-BETA releases are generally considered not as stable as their Beta counterparts. Some features may not be implemented and it would not be surprising to the developers to experience a Blocker issue and/or major bugs. BETA = minor tweaking needed Pre-BETA = major development ...

I wouldn't call it backward porting testing at all. Within A, the feature from B is brand new, making it A+2. It's a new feature in its own right. The fact that A, B, A+1 and B+1 were tested and found stable doesn't guarantee that A+(B+1) will be bug free. There isn't another name for that other than "testing".

For the actual question you asked - I don't know of any good source of testing definitions or classifications. When in doubt, ask the speaker what he or she means. If the definition given doesn't seem to match the obvious definition, question it - although not necessarily to the speaker (especially if that person is your boss). SQA.SE is a good place to ...

Tim, As long as everyone in the team and everyone you communicate results and other data to knows what your terminology is, it doesn't matter what you call it. You could call it doughnut testing if you really wanted to, so long as you defined it as "what happens when critical resources fail". Personally, I'd call what you're describing fail-over testing or ...

Today, almost every organization has a QA department that is responsible for “testing” software applications to discover and eliminate bugs. However, there is a fundamental flaw in this definition of the role of QA in an organization. Most executives that I have talked to, fail to understand the difference between Quality Assurance and Testing, and ...

I totally disagree. Running the same test on the same machine will not do much but running integration tests and running on different environments you will surface some of the racing conditions (works especially for desktop apps) Another great way to iron out race conditions and the such is to perform load testing - works especially for services and ...

The system test precedes the system integration test. The goal of the system test is to test exactly one system. If this system depends on other systems, these should not be tested at the same time, but stubs should be used instead of them. The reason for this is, that it is harder to identify the root cause of observed failures, if multiple systems are ...

My thoughts are that this is more about the differences between static and dynamic than analysis and testing. My own personal definitions are: Static testing = Testing of requirements, designs, specifications, log files, configuration files etc. Dynamic testing = Testing of the application whilst it is running. Likewise, Static analysis = Analysis of ...

Yes it is fail-Over testing. There's seems to be no reason for giving it a different name on the basis of manual or automation. Even we do it many times: In out clustered environment, we take down one of the server and then send the requests manually just to verify that the other server is taking the request or not and we call it fail-over test only.

This seems to be more of a philosophical question than a practical one. The use of the term "functional testing" is not particularly important; what is more important is what you do, and why you do it. Yes, what you described is a risk-based approach, but the entire testing practice is an approach to mitigating risk. The fact that we "do not test ...

Historically Quality Control is term from 1970s which meaning was controlling of the final product quality. In 1980s this term get a new meaning when people realized that they should also control quality of intermediate products. A decade later term Software Quality Assurance came up when stress was set not only on quality of products but also on ...

Getting as close as possible to your question "Are code reviews considered part of QA?", I guess you're trying to identify what team (QA vs Dev) should be responsible for "code reviews". In my opinion both of them should take care of that issue, but QA should manage the situation. Code review, either as part of a "peer programming" experience or just as ...