1,075 terms · 21 categories · 111 agentic & AI

The QA & agentic testing glossary.

From acceptance criteria to zoom testing, 1,075 testing terms defined by engineers, not marketers. Browse by letter, filter by category, or search for exactly what you need.

Last reviewed July 2026 · 21 categories

A91 terms

Acceptance Criteria#Test Planning & Governance
Clear, testable conditions that a product increment must satisfy before stakeholders consider it acceptable.
Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD)#Test Design & Coverage
A collaborative practice in which examples and acceptance tests are defined before implementation to guide development and confirm business value.
Acceptance Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that determines whether a system is ready for acceptance by users, customers, operators, regulators, or another approving party.
Access Control Testing#Security Testing
Testing that users and services can perform only the actions allowed for their identity, role, ownership, and context.
Accessibility Audit#Accessibility Testing
A structured evaluation of digital content using automated checks, expert inspection, assistive technology, and documented conformance criteria.
Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR)#Accessibility Testing
A document describing how a product meets or does not meet specified accessibility requirements, often based on a VPAT template.
Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT)#Accessibility Testing
Rule-based or procedural testing used to determine whether content satisfies defined accessibility requirements.
Accessibility Scanner#Accessibility Testing
A tool that automatically checks digital content against a set of machine-testable accessibility rules.
Accessibility Statement#Accessibility Testing
A public description of a product's accessibility commitments, conformance status, known limitations, and support or feedback channels.
Accessibility Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing that evaluates whether people with disabilities can perceive, operate, understand, and robustly use a product.
Accessibility Tree#Accessibility Testing
A browser or platform representation of interface semantics exposed to assistive technologies.
Accessible Authentication#Accessibility Testing
Authentication that does not impose unnecessary cognitive tests and supports accessible alternatives, assistance, and password managers.
Accessible Description#Accessibility Testing
Supplementary text that gives assistive-technology users additional information about an element beyond its accessible name.
Accessible Name#Accessibility Testing
The text alternative used by assistive technology to identify a control, landmark, image, or other interface element.
Accessible PDF#Accessibility Testing
A PDF with semantic tags, meaningful reading order, text alternatives, navigable structure, and usable form controls.
ACID Properties#Data & Database Testing
The database transaction properties of atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability.
Action Trace#Agentic & AI Testing
A chronological record of an agent's actions, tool calls, observations, and outcomes during a test session.
Actual Result#Core Testing Concepts
The behavior or output observed when a test is executed, compared with the expected result to determine the outcome.
Ad Hoc Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Informal testing performed without detailed prewritten cases, relying on the tester's knowledge to explore likely problem areas.
Affected Version#Defect Management
The product version, build, commit, or release in which a defect has been observed.
Agent Benchmark#Agentic & AI Testing
A standardized collection of tasks, environments, scoring rules, and resource limits used to compare agent capabilities.
Agent Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Systematic measurement of an AI agent's task success, safety, reliability, efficiency, and behavior under defined conditions.
Agent Test Session#Agentic & AI Testing
A bounded autonomous testing run with a goal, environment, permissions, budget, evidence, and stop condition.
Agent Trajectory#Agentic & AI Testing
The complete sequence of states, observations, decisions, actions, tool calls, and outputs produced while an agent attempts a task.
Agentic AI Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing of agentic AI systems for task success, safety, tool use, permissions, robustness, and long-horizon behavior.
Agentic Application Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing software that contains autonomous agents, including orchestration, memory, tools, guardrails, and user-impacting actions.
Agentic QA#Agentic & AI Testing
Quality engineering performed or augmented by autonomous agents that can plan, explore, verify, and report across workflows.
Agentic Test Platform#Agentic & AI Testing
A system that uses autonomous agents to explore software, create and execute tests, collect evidence, and report defects with limited supervision.
Agentic Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Goal-directed software testing in which AI agents plan, act, observe, adapt, and report findings across multi-step workflows.
AI Agent Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Evaluation of an AI agent's goals, plans, actions, tool calls, outcomes, safety boundaries, and recovery behavior.
AI Browser Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Use of AI to understand and exercise browser interfaces, adapt to state, and evaluate web behavior.
AI Bug Detection#Agentic & AI Testing
Use of AI models or agents to identify, classify, and explain potential software defects from execution and product evidence.
AI Quality Assurance#Agentic & AI Testing
Application of AI across quality planning, prevention, testing, diagnosis, defect management, and release decisions.
AI Software Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
A broad term covering both AI-assisted software testing and testing of software that contains AI capabilities.
AI Test Agent#Agentic & AI Testing
An AI-powered agent designed to investigate software, execute interactions, evaluate outcomes, and produce actionable quality evidence.
AI Test Automation#Agentic & AI Testing
Test automation that uses AI for generation, adaptation, exploration, visual understanding, diagnosis, or maintenance.
AI Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
A broad term that can mean testing AI systems or using AI to improve software testing, so scope should be stated explicitly.
AI Website Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Use of AI to explore and evaluate website functionality, usability, visuals, accessibility, performance, and errors.
AI-Assisted Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing in which AI helps people design, execute, analyze, maintain, or prioritize tests while humans retain key decisions.
Alert#Observability & Diagnostics
A notification triggered when observed conditions indicate a failure, risk, or threshold requiring attention.
Alert Fatigue#Observability & Diagnostics
Reduced ability to respond effectively because alerts are too frequent, noisy, duplicated, or low-value.
Alpha Testing#Test Types & Levels
Pre-release acceptance testing performed in a controlled setting, typically by internal staff or selected users before broader beta testing.
Alt Text Quality Testing#Accessibility Testing
Human or AI-assisted evaluation of whether image alternatives are accurate, concise, contextual, and equivalent to the image's purpose.
Alternative Text#Accessibility Testing
Text that communicates the purpose or content of a meaningful non-text element, such as an image or icon.
Anomaly#Core Testing Concepts
Any observed condition that differs from expectations, requirements, prior behavior, or a relevant reference and may require investigation.
Anonymization#Test Data & Environments
Transformation of personal data so individuals can no longer be identified by reasonably available means.
Apdex (Application Performance Index)#Performance & Scalability
A standardized score that classifies response times as satisfied, tolerating, or frustrated against a chosen target.
API Contract#API & Service Testing
A machine-readable or documented agreement describing an API's operations, inputs, outputs, schemas, errors, and behavioral expectations.
API Contract Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing that verifies an API implementation and its consumers conform to an agreed interface and behavior contract.
API Error Response#API & Service Testing
A structured response that communicates why a request could not be processed, ideally with a stable code and actionable detail.
API Functional Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing API operations, business rules, validation, state changes, and responses against expected behavior.
API Fuzz Testing#API & Service Testing
Supplying generated, malformed, unexpected, or extreme requests to an API to expose robustness and security defects.
API Load Testing#API & Service Testing
Applying concurrent API traffic to measure latency, throughput, errors, saturation, and behavior under expected workload.
API Mocking#API & Service Testing
Replacing a real API with a controlled implementation that returns predefined or programmable responses for testing.
API Observability#API & Service Testing
The ability to understand API behavior through correlated requests, errors, logs, metrics, traces, and dependency information.
API Security Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing API authentication, authorization, validation, data exposure, abuse resistance, and other security controls.
API Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing an application's service interfaces directly, without depending on the graphical user interface.
API Virtualization#API & Service Testing
Simulation of API behavior, state, timing, and faults when real services are unavailable, costly, unstable, or unsafe to use.
App Lifecycle Testing#Mobile & Device Testing
Testing mobile behavior across launch, resume, pause, background, termination, restoration, update, and reinstall events.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM)#Observability & Diagnostics
Continuous collection and analysis of application transactions, latency, errors, dependencies, and resource behavior.
Application Security Testing (AST)#Security Testing
The combined practices used to discover, validate, and manage security weaknesses in software across its lifecycle.
Approval Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that compares current output with a human-approved reference and highlights differences for review.
ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications)#Accessibility Testing
A W3C specification that adds accessibility semantics to web content when native HTML alone is insufficient.
ARIA Role#Accessibility Testing
A semantic role that communicates an element's purpose or interaction pattern to assistive technology.
Arrival Rate#Performance & Scalability
The number of new requests, transactions, or users entering a system per unit of time.
Assertion#Automation & Tooling
A machine-evaluated statement that compares an observed value or state with an expected condition.
Assertion Library#Automation & Tooling
A reusable collection of assertions and matchers for expressing expected outcomes in automated tests.
Assistive Technology#Accessibility Testing
Hardware or software that helps people with disabilities interact with digital content, such as screen readers or switch controls.
Asynchronous API Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing operations whose completion, events, or responses occur later than the initiating request.
Atomicity#Data & Database Testing
The transaction property that all operations complete as one unit or none of them take effect.
Attribute#Observability & Diagnostics
A key-value property attached to telemetry to describe the operation, resource, user, environment, or result.
Audio Description#Accessibility Testing
Narration that communicates important visual information in video for people who cannot see it.
Audit Trail#Agentic & AI Testing
A durable record of inputs, decisions, actions, evidence, and outcomes that allows an agent run or test conclusion to be reviewed.
Authentication Testing#Security Testing
Testing login, identity verification, recovery, lockout, multi-factor authentication, and session establishment.
Authorization Testing#Security Testing
Testing whether authenticated identities are correctly permitted or denied actions on each resource and function.
Auto-Waiting#Automation & Tooling
Automation behavior that waits for relevant readiness conditions, such as visibility or stability, before performing an action or assertion.
Automated Accessibility Testing#Accessibility Testing
Tool-based evaluation of machine-testable accessibility rules in markup, styles, content, and interactive states.
Automated Bug Discovery#Agentic & AI Testing
Machine-driven exploration and checking that finds previously unknown failures without requiring every test path to be scripted in advance.
Automated Bug Reproduction#Agentic & AI Testing
Automatic creation and verification of a reliable sequence of steps that triggers an observed defect again.
Automated Oracle Synthesis#Agentic & AI Testing
The creation of expected-result logic from requirements, examples, models, invariants, or observed behavior when no oracle is already available.
Automated Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing in which software controls test setup, execution, comparison, and reporting with limited human intervention.
Automated Website Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Use of software to repeatedly evaluate website behavior, compatibility, accessibility, performance, security, or visual correctness.
Autonomous Exploratory Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Exploratory testing performed by an agent that continuously chooses new actions based on observed states, risks, and prior findings.
Autonomous QA#Agentic & AI Testing
A quality approach in which agents independently perform bounded testing, evidence collection, diagnosis, and triage.
Autonomous Root Cause Analysis#Agentic & AI Testing
Agent-assisted investigation that correlates failures, changes, traces, logs, and dependencies to propose evidence-backed causes.
Autonomous Test Execution#Agentic & AI Testing
Execution in which an agent controls navigation, data, checks, recovery, and evidence collection within defined boundaries.
Autonomous Test Generation#Agentic & AI Testing
Automatic creation of test scenarios, inputs, actions, and checks from goals, requirements, models, application state, or learned patterns.
Autonomous Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing in which software independently selects, performs, and adapts test activities within a defined objective and control framework.
Autonomous Triage#Agentic & AI Testing
Automatic classification, deduplication, severity estimation, routing, and evidence enrichment of discovered issues.
Autonomous Website Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Goal-driven website testing in which an agent chooses interactions and checks dynamically from observed page state.

B50 terms

Back Navigation Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing that browser or app back actions restore the correct page, state, focus, scroll position, and data.
Back-to-Back Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that runs equivalent inputs through two implementations and compares their outputs to detect behavioral differences.
Background Execution Testing#Mobile & Device Testing
Testing how a mobile app behaves when backgrounded, suspended, limited by the operating system, or performing allowed background work.
Backlog Trend#Metrics & Reporting
The change in open work or defects over time, showing whether arrivals are outpacing resolution.
Backup and Restore Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that verifies backups are complete, protected, usable, and capable of restoring the required data and service state.
Backward Compatibility#API & Service Testing
The ability of a changed service or product to continue supporting existing consumers, data, workflows, and integrations.
Baggage#Observability & Diagnostics
Contextual key-value data propagated across service boundaries alongside distributed traces.
Bandwidth#Performance & Scalability
The maximum rate at which data can be transferred through a network path or interface.
Baseline Performance#Performance & Scalability
Measured performance under a defined reference build, environment, data set, and workload for future comparison.
Basis Path Testing#Test Design & Coverage
A white-box technique that derives tests from linearly independent control-flow paths, often using cyclomatic complexity.
Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)#Test Design & Coverage
A collaborative approach that expresses expected behavior through concrete examples, often written in Given-When-Then form and automated as tests.
Benchmark Contamination#Agentic & AI Testing
Evaluation distortion caused when benchmark tasks, answers, or close variants were present in training data or otherwise known to the model.
Benchmark Saturation#Agentic & AI Testing
The point at which a benchmark no longer separates capabilities well because most systems achieve similarly high scores.
Beta Testing#Test Types & Levels
Pre-release testing by representative external users in realistic environments to uncover issues and gather product feedback.
Bias Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Evaluation of whether an AI system produces systematically unfair or unbalanced outcomes across relevant groups or contexts.
Bidirectional Traceability#Test Planning & Governance
Traceability that connects requirements to tests and test results, and also connects each test back to its originating requirement.
Binary Payload Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing upload, download, metadata, size, integrity, and error handling for non-text API content such as images or archives.
Biometric Authentication Testing#Mobile & Device Testing
Testing mobile authentication using fingerprint, face, or other biometrics, including enrollment changes, fallback, lockout, and cancellation.
Black-Box Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing based on externally visible behavior and specifications without relying on knowledge of the internal implementation.
Blast Radius#Reliability & Resilience
The users, services, data, regions, or operations that could be affected by a failure or experiment.
Blocked Test#Defect Management
A test that cannot execute or complete because a prerequisite, environment, dependency, data item, or earlier step is unavailable.
Blocker Defect#Defect Management
A defect severe enough to prevent critical use, testing, delivery, or operation with no acceptable workaround.
Bottleneck#Performance & Scalability
The resource, dependency, lock, or processing stage that most limits overall system capacity or throughput.
Bottleneck Analysis#Performance & Scalability
Investigation that correlates workload, timing, queues, dependencies, and resource saturation to identify the primary performance constraint.
Braille Display Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing interface semantics and navigation with hardware that renders screen-reader output as refreshable braille.
Branch Coverage#Test Design & Coverage
The percentage of control-flow branches, such as true and false decision outcomes, exercised by a test suite.
Browser Automation#Automation & Tooling
Programmatic control of a web browser to navigate pages, interact with elements, inspect state, and verify outcomes.
Browser Compatibility Matrix#Web & Browser Testing
The defined combinations of browsers, versions, operating systems, and devices a product commits to support and test.
Browser Console#Web & Browser Testing
A browser diagnostic interface that records JavaScript errors, warnings, security messages, and application logging.
Browser Context#Automation & Tooling
An isolated browser session with its own cookies, storage, permissions, and pages, used to keep tests independent.
Browser Developer Tools#Web & Browser Testing
Built-in browser tools for inspecting the DOM, CSS, network, storage, performance, accessibility, and runtime behavior.
Browser History Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing navigation history, back and forward behavior, route restoration, and state preservation.
Browser Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing web behavior in a browser, including rendering, interaction, navigation, storage, network, compatibility, and diagnostics.
Bug#Core Testing Concepts
A commonly used term for a defect in software, documentation, data, configuration, or another product artifact.
Bug Aging#Metrics & Reporting
The elapsed time a defect remains open, often analyzed by severity, owner, status, or release.
Bug Backlog#Defect Management
The collection of reported defects that remain unresolved, deferred, or awaiting triage.
Bug Cluster#Defect Management
A group of findings that share a likely symptom, component, cause, or remediation and may represent one underlying defect.
Bug Deduplication#Defect Management
Identifying reports that describe the same underlying defect and linking or merging them into one canonical issue.
Bug Detection Precision#Metrics & Reporting
The proportion of reported bug findings that are confirmed as real defects rather than false positives.
Bug Detection Recall#Metrics & Reporting
The proportion of all relevant defects in an evaluated set that a testing system successfully discovers.
Bug Report#Defect Management
A structured record of a suspected defect with summary, context, steps, expected and actual behavior, impact, and evidence.
Bug Report Generation#Defect Management
Automatic creation of a clear, structured defect report from captured test actions, observations, and evidence.
Build Pipeline#CI/CD & Release Quality
An automated sequence that converts source changes into tested, packaged, and traceable artifacts.
Build Verification Testing (BVT)#Test Types & Levels
A short automated test set that checks whether a new build is stable enough for deeper testing.
Burn Rate#Reliability & Resilience
The speed at which a service consumes its error budget relative to the rate allowed by its SLO.
Business Impact#Defect Management
The effect of a defect or failure on revenue, cost, operations, obligations, reputation, or strategic objectives.
Business Logic Testing#Security Testing
Security testing of workflows, limits, sequencing, trust assumptions, economic rules, and abuse-resistant behavior.
Bypass Blocks#Accessibility Testing
Providing a mechanism, such as a skip link or landmark navigation, to move past repeated content to the main page area.

C104 terms

Calibration#Agentic & AI Testing
The degree to which an agent's confidence scores correspond to the observed frequency of correct conclusions.
Call Coverage#Test Design & Coverage
The proportion of defined function or method calls exercised by tests, including relevant caller-to-callee relationships.
Canary Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Running a new model, prompt, or agent configuration on a limited evaluation slice before wider adoption.
Canonical URL#SEO & Web Quality
The preferred URL declared for a page when the same or similar content is reachable through multiple addresses.
Canonicalization Testing#SEO & Web Quality
Testing that canonical tags, redirects, and URL rules consistently identify the intended preferred version of content.
Capability Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing designed to measure what tasks or behaviors an AI system can perform under specified conditions.
Capacity#Performance & Scalability
The maximum workload a system can support while meeting defined performance and reliability objectives.
Capacity Model#Performance & Scalability
A quantitative relationship among workload, resources, throughput, latency, and service targets used for planning and testing.
Capacity Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that identifies the maximum workload or resource demand a system can handle while meeting defined service objectives.
CAPTCHA Accessibility#Accessibility Testing
Evaluation of whether bot-detection challenges provide usable, equivalent alternatives for people with disabilities.
Caption Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing that video captions are accurate, synchronized, complete, correctly identified, and available for relevant audio.
Capture-and-Replay#Automation & Tooling
Automation that records user interactions and generates a script that can replay the captured sequence.
Cardinality#Observability & Diagnostics
The number of distinct values for a telemetry attribute, which can strongly affect observability cost and query performance.
Cascading Failure#Reliability & Resilience
A failure that spreads through dependencies or shared resources and causes additional services to degrade or fail.
Causal Analysis#Observability & Diagnostics
Investigation of evidence and dependencies to distinguish contributing causes from correlated symptoms.
Cause-Effect Graphing#Test Design & Coverage
A black-box technique that models logical relationships between input conditions and outcomes, then derives tests from the graph.
Certificate Validation Testing#Security Testing
Testing hostname, trust chain, validity dates, revocation behavior, algorithms, and failure handling for digital certificates.
Change Data Capture (CDC)#Data & Database Testing
A mechanism that records database changes and propagates them to downstream systems, streams, or replicas.
Change Failure Rate#Metrics & Reporting
The percentage of production changes that cause degraded service and require remediation such as rollback, fix, or intervention.
Chaos Engineering#Reliability & Resilience
The discipline of building confidence in resilience through controlled experiments that introduce adverse conditions and test hypotheses.
Chaos Experiment#Reliability & Resilience
A bounded, observable intervention that introduces a fault or disruption to evaluate a resilience hypothesis.
Chaos Testing#Reliability & Resilience
The execution of controlled failure scenarios to reveal weaknesses in detection, isolation, recovery, and operational response.
Characterization Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that captures the current behavior of existing software, especially before refactoring code that lacks reliable specifications.
Checklist-Based Testing#Test Design & Coverage
An experience-based technique that uses a curated checklist of risks, rules, and past defects to guide testing.
Checksum Validation#Data & Database Testing
Comparing computed digests to verify that data or files remain complete and unchanged across transfer or transformation.
CI Matrix#CI/CD & Release Quality
A pipeline configuration that runs jobs across combinations of operating systems, runtimes, browsers, versions, or settings.
CI Runner#CI/CD & Release Quality
A machine, container, or process that executes continuous-integration workflow jobs.
CI/CD Pipeline#CI/CD & Release Quality
An automated delivery workflow that builds, tests, packages, and deploys software changes through controlled stages.
Classification Tree Method#Test Design & Coverage
A systematic technique that partitions input conditions into classes and combines representative values to design test cases.
Client Error Response#API & Service Testing
An HTTP 4xx response indicating that the server cannot fulfill the request because of client-side input, identity, permission, or state.
Client-Side Performance Testing#Performance & Scalability
Testing browser or app loading, rendering, scripting, responsiveness, memory, and network behavior from the user's side.
Client-Side Security Testing#Security Testing
Testing whether browser-executed code, storage, DOM interactions, and web APIs enforce defined security requirements.
Client-Side Validation#Web & Browser Testing
Validation performed in the browser to give fast feedback before data is submitted, but not a substitute for server-side validation.
Closed Defect#Defect Management
A defect whose resolution and required verification are complete according to the team's workflow.
Closed Workload Model#Performance & Scalability
A performance model with a fixed user population in which each user starts new work after completing and pausing from prior work.
Closed-Loop Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing in which each observation feeds back into the next decision, allowing the system to adapt its actions during execution.
Code Coverage#Test Design & Coverage
A family of measures showing how much executable code structure, such as statements or branches, was exercised by tests.
Code Review#Test Design & Coverage
A structured examination of source code to identify defects, security weaknesses, maintainability issues, and standards violations before execution.
Codeless Testing#Automation & Tooling
Test automation created primarily through visual flows, recorded interactions, or natural language instead of hand-written code.
Cognitive Accessibility Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing whether content and interactions support users with cognitive, language, learning, attention, and memory differences.
Cold Start#Performance & Scalability
The latency and resource cost of starting a process, function, container, cache, or service from an inactive state.
Collation Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing database rules for text comparison, ordering, case sensitivity, accents, and locale-specific behavior.
Color Contrast Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing whether text, controls, icons, focus indicators, and meaningful graphics have sufficient visual contrast against adjacent colors.
Color Independence#Accessibility Testing
The requirement that color is not the only visual means used to convey information, status, prompts, or distinctions.
Combinatorial Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that covers selected combinations of input values or configuration factors to expose interaction faults efficiently.
Commit-Stage Testing#CI/CD & Release Quality
Fast tests and checks run soon after a source change to provide early delivery feedback.
Compatibility#Quality Attributes & UX
The ability of a product to exchange information or share an environment with other products without unacceptable interference.
Compatibility Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that checks behavior across supported browsers, devices, operating systems, hardware, networks, versions, or interacting products.
Compliance Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that evaluates conformance to laws, regulations, contractual obligations, policies, or technical standards.
Component Integration Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing focused on interfaces and interactions between integrated components within a larger system.
Component Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing of an individual software or hardware component in isolation from most of the surrounding system.
Concolic Testing#Test Design & Coverage
A technique that combines concrete execution with symbolic reasoning to generate inputs that explore additional program paths.
Concurrency Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that exposes faults caused by simultaneous operations, shared resources, race conditions, locks, or timing dependencies.
Condition Coverage#Test Design & Coverage
The percentage of individual Boolean conditions evaluated as both true and false during testing.
Confidence Interval#Metrics & Reporting
A statistical range that expresses uncertainty around an estimated metric such as failure rate, latency, precision, or recall.
Confidence Score#Agentic & AI Testing
A numeric estimate of how strongly a model or agent supports a prediction, finding, classification, or action.
Configuration Drift#Test Data & Environments
Unplanned difference between the intended configuration and the actual state of an environment or system.
Configuration Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that checks behavior under different supported settings, feature flags, dependencies, hardware profiles, or deployment configurations.
Confirmation Testing#Core Testing Concepts
Testing performed after a fix to confirm that the specific defect has been corrected.
Connection Pool#Performance & Scalability
A managed set of reusable network or database connections that can improve performance but also become a capacity bottleneck.
Console Log#Observability & Diagnostics
Diagnostic output emitted by browser or application code to a runtime console during execution.
Constraint-Based Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that uses formal constraints to generate or select inputs satisfying valid, invalid, boundary, or high-risk combinations.
Consumer-Driven Contract Testing#API & Service Testing
Contract testing in which API expectations are captured from consumer needs and verified against the provider.
Container Security Testing#Security Testing
Testing container images and runtime configuration for unsafe privileges, isolation defects, dependency problems, secret exposure, and unintended services.
Containerized Test Runner#Automation & Tooling
A test runner packaged in a container to provide portable, repeatable dependencies and execution conditions.
Context Propagation#Observability & Diagnostics
Transfer of trace and related context across process, service, thread, and network boundaries so telemetry can be correlated.
Continuous Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Automated, repeated evaluation of models or agents as prompts, tools, data, dependencies, and behavior change.
Continuous Integration (CI)#CI/CD & Release Quality
Frequent integration of source changes with automated builds and tests that provide rapid feedback.
Continuous Quality#Test Planning & Governance
A delivery practice that treats quality evidence and improvement as an ongoing responsibility across planning, development, release, and operation.
Continuous Testing#Test Planning & Governance
Automated and manual quality activities embedded throughout delivery so teams receive timely evidence about every meaningful change.
Continuous Verification#CI/CD & Release Quality
Ongoing evaluation of release health using tests, telemetry, policies, and user-impact signals during and after deployment.
Contractual Acceptance Testing#Test Types & Levels
Acceptance testing that checks whether a system fulfills criteria defined in a customer or supplier contract.
Control Flow Testing#Test Design & Coverage
White-box testing based on the order in which statements, decisions, and branches can execute through a program.
Controllability#Core Testing Concepts
The ease with which tests can place a system in a required state, provide inputs, and isolate relevant behaviors.
Coordinated Omission#Performance & Scalability
A load-testing measurement error that under-reports latency because the generator stops sending work while the system is slow.
Core Web Vitals#SEO & Web Quality
Google's user-experience metrics for loading performance, interaction responsiveness, and visual stability: LCP, INP, and CLS.
Corner Case#Core Testing Concepts
A test situation created by the interaction of multiple extreme or unusual conditions at the same time.
Correlation ID#API & Service Testing
An identifier carried across related requests, messages, and services so one transaction can be traced end to end.
Cost per Test#Metrics & Reporting
The total compute, infrastructure, tool, maintenance, and human effort attributable to executing or sustaining a test.
Counter Metric#Observability & Diagnostics
A cumulative metric that generally increases over time, such as requests, errors, or processed bytes.
Coverage Analysis#Test Design & Coverage
The examination of achieved coverage against goals to identify untested requirements, risks, code, data, platforms, or user journeys.
Coverage Criterion#Test Design & Coverage
A rule that defines what elements or combinations must be exercised for a stated level of test coverage.
Coverage Gap#Test Design & Coverage
A requirement, risk, path, platform, or behavior that is not adequately exercised by the current tests.
Coverage Goal#Test Planning & Governance
A planned target for the requirements, risks, code structures, platforms, data combinations, or journeys that tests should exercise.
Coverage-Guided Agent#Agentic & AI Testing
An agent that uses measured coverage or unexplored application state to choose actions likely to reveal new behavior.
CPU Profile#Observability & Diagnostics
A sampled or instrumented view showing where a process spends processor time.
CPU Saturation#Performance & Scalability
A condition in which processor demand approaches or exceeds available capacity, causing queues and latency to grow.
CPU Utilization#Performance & Scalability
The proportion of processor capacity consumed during a measured interval.
Crash Report#Observability & Diagnostics
A diagnostic artifact describing an unexpected process termination, often including stack, signal, thread, device, and version information.
Crawl Budget#SEO & Web Quality
The practical amount of crawling a search engine is willing and able to spend on a site within a period.
Crawlability#SEO & Web Quality
The degree to which search engine crawlers can discover and access a site's important URLs and resources.
Critical Defect#Defect Management
A defect that causes severe user, business, security, safety, or operational impact and demands urgent response.
Critical User Journey Monitoring#Observability & Diagnostics
Continuous checks of high-value end-to-end user flows to detect functional or performance failure.
Cross-Browser Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing that a website works acceptably across its supported browsers, engines, versions, and device contexts.
Cross-Device Testing#Mobile & Device Testing
Testing consistent behavior across device categories, models, screen sizes, input methods, capabilities, and operating systems.
Cross-Modal Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing that validates consistency and correctness across text, visual, audio, document, and structured-data representations.
Cross-Platform Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that verifies consistent behavior across supported operating systems, hardware architectures, runtimes, or device families.
Crowdsourced Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing performed by a distributed external community to obtain broad device, location, language, and user-perspective coverage.
CRUD Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing create, read, update, and delete operations, including permissions, validation, state, and persistence.
Cryptographic Testing#Security Testing
Testing algorithms, protocols, key management, randomness, storage, transport, and failure behavior for cryptographic controls.
CSS Selector#Automation & Tooling
A pattern used by browser automation to locate elements through HTML tags, attributes, classes, identifiers, or relationships.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)#SEO & Web Quality
A Core Web Vital that measures unexpected movement of visible page content during a user's visit.
Cyclomatic Complexity#Test Design & Coverage
A code metric based on independent control-flow paths that can help estimate structural complexity and minimum basis-path tests.

D95 terms

Data Accuracy#Data & Database Testing
The degree to which data correctly represents the real-world object, event, or source it is intended to describe.
Data Completeness#Data & Database Testing
The degree to which all required records, fields, relationships, and time periods are present.
Data Consistency#Data & Database Testing
The degree to which data does not conflict across fields, records, systems, replicas, or time.
Data Corruption#Reliability & Resilience
Unintended alteration of data that makes it inaccurate, inconsistent, unreadable, or unsafe to use.
Data Currentness#Data & Database Testing
The degree to which data is sufficiently up to date for its intended use.
Data Durability#Reliability & Resilience
The ability of committed data to remain intact and retrievable despite failures, restarts, or storage events.
Data Factory#Test Data & Environments
Reusable code or configuration that creates test objects and records with controlled defaults and variations.
Data Flow Testing#Test Design & Coverage
White-box testing that designs cases around where variables are defined, used, changed, and potentially misused.
Data Integrity Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing that data remains accurate, complete, consistent, and correctly related across operations and system boundaries.
Data Lineage#Data & Database Testing
Recorded information about where data originated, how it moved, and which transformations or systems changed it.
Data Loss#Reliability & Resilience
Permanent or unacceptable absence of data that should have been retained or recoverable.
Data Masking#Test Data & Environments
Replacing sensitive values with realistic but protected substitutes while preserving characteristics needed for testing.
Data Migration Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing that data moved between systems or versions remains complete, accurate, consistent, secure, and usable.
Data Minimization#Test Data & Environments
Limiting collected, copied, retained, and exposed data to what is necessary for a defined purpose.
Data Observability#Data & Database Testing
Monitoring data pipelines and products for freshness, volume, distribution, schema, lineage, and quality anomalies.
Data Pipeline Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing ingestion, transformation, movement, storage, scheduling, retries, quality, and downstream delivery of data.
Data Precision Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing that numeric values retain the required significant digits and scale through storage, calculation, and transfer.
Data Quality Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing data against defined expectations for accuracy, completeness, consistency, validity, uniqueness, timeliness, and integrity.
Data Reconciliation#Data & Database Testing
Comparing data between sources, stages, or systems to identify missing, duplicated, transformed, or inconsistent records.
Data Reset#Test Data & Environments
Restoring test data and state to a known baseline between executions.
Data Seed#Test Data & Environments
A repeatable set of initial records or generation instructions used to populate a test environment.
Data Type Validation#Data & Database Testing
Testing that stored and exchanged values conform to expected types, formats, ranges, precision, and nullability.
Data Uniqueness#Data & Database Testing
The degree to which records or identifiers that should be unique are not duplicated.
Data Validity#Data & Database Testing
The degree to which data follows defined syntax, domain, range, relationship, and business rules.
Data-Driven Testing#Automation & Tooling
Automation that runs the same test logic with multiple input and expected-result datasets.
Database Backup Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing that database backups are created consistently, contain required objects and logs, and can support the intended recovery.
Database Snapshot#Test Data & Environments
A point-in-time representation of database state used for restore, cloning, comparison, or repeatable testing.
Database Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing schemas, queries, procedures, transactions, constraints, migrations, security, performance, and stored data quality.
Dataset Versioning#Agentic & AI Testing
Tracking evaluation or test datasets as immutable, named versions so results can be reproduced and compared fairly.
Daylight Saving Time Testing#Test Data & Environments
Testing date, time, schedules, expiry, billing, and duration behavior across daylight-saving transitions.
Deadlock#Data & Database Testing
A state in which transactions or threads wait indefinitely for resources held by one another.
Debugging#Core Testing Concepts
The activity of locating, understanding, and correcting the cause of a failure; testing supplies evidence but does not itself fix the fault.
Decision Coverage#Test Design & Coverage
The percentage of decision outcomes exercised by tests, usually requiring every decision to evaluate both true and false.
Decision Table Testing#Test Design & Coverage
A black-box technique that represents combinations of conditions and resulting actions in a table, then derives tests from meaningful rules.
Decision Trace#Agentic & AI Testing
A structured record of the information and rules that led an agent to select an action or conclusion.
Defect#Core Testing Concepts
A flaw in a work product that may cause the software to fail or produce an unacceptable outcome.
Defect Arrival Rate#Metrics & Reporting
The number of new defects reported per unit of time, often tracked by release, area, or severity.
Defect Classification#Defect Management
Assigning structured attributes such as type, component, cause, severity, source, and detection phase to a defect.
Defect Closure#Defect Management
Formal completion of a defect after resolution, verification, documentation, and any required release action.
Defect Containment#Defect Management
Controls that prevent a defect or failure from spreading to additional components, users, data, or environments.
Defect Density#Metrics & Reporting
The number of confirmed defects relative to a chosen product size measure, such as code, function points, stories, or components.
Defect Detection#Defect Management
The discovery and recognition of a flaw through reviews, analysis, tests, monitoring, or user evidence.
Defect Detection Percentage (DDP)#Metrics & Reporting
The proportion of defects found before release compared with the total found before and after release for the same scope.
Defect Escape#Defect Management
A defect not detected in an earlier test stage that is found later, especially after release.
Defect Escape Rate#Metrics & Reporting
The proportion or rate of relevant defects first discovered after the intended detection stage or release.
Defect Fingerprint#Defect Management
A normalized signature derived from symptoms, stack, route, environment, component, and evidence to group recurring defects.
Defect Leakage#Defect Management
The movement of undetected defects from one test level, phase, or control point into a later one.
Defect Lifecycle#Defect Management
The states and transitions a defect follows from discovery through triage, resolution, verification, closure, or deferral.
Defect Prevention#Defect Management
Process, design, tooling, and learning activities intended to stop defects from being introduced or repeated.
Defect Priority#Defect Management
The business and delivery urgency assigned to resolving a defect.
Defect Removal Efficiency (DRE)#Metrics & Reporting
The proportion of relevant defects removed before a defined release or phase boundary.
Defect Reopen Rate#Metrics & Reporting
The proportion of closed or resolved defects that are reopened because the issue persists, recurs, or was incompletely addressed.
Defect Reproduction#Defect Management
The act of triggering a reported defect again under known conditions to validate and investigate it.
Defect Severity#Defect Management
The degree of technical, user, business, security, or operational impact caused by a defect.
Defect Similarity Matching#Defect Management
Comparison of text, traces, screenshots, components, environments, and behavior to estimate whether findings describe the same defect.
Defect Status#Defect Management
The current workflow state of a defect, such as new, triaged, in progress, resolved, verified, deferred, or closed.
Defect Taxonomy#Defect Management
A consistent classification system for organizing defects by type, source, cause, component, impact, or detection method.
Defect Trend#Metrics & Reporting
Change in defect arrivals, closures, backlog, severity, age, or escapes over time.
Defect Triage#Defect Management
Review and decision-making that validates a finding, assesses impact and urgency, checks duplication, assigns ownership, and selects next action.
Defect-Based Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing designed from known defect categories, historical failures, fault models, or recurring implementation mistakes.
Deferred Defect#Defect Management
A confirmed defect intentionally postponed to a later release or decision point.
Definition of Done (DoD)#Test Planning & Governance
A shared checklist of quality conditions that a product increment must meet before the team considers it complete.
Delivery Pipeline#CI/CD & Release Quality
The automated path through which a change is built, tested, packaged, promoted, deployed, and observed.
Dependency Contract#API & Service Testing
The behavioral and data expectations between a service and an upstream or downstream dependency.
Dependency Scanning#Security Testing
Automated analysis of third-party libraries and packages for known security defects, integrity issues, obsolete versions, and policy violations.
Deployment Frequency#Metrics & Reporting
How often an organization successfully deploys changes to a production environment.
Deployment Verification#CI/CD & Release Quality
Checks performed during or immediately after deployment to confirm the correct version, configuration, dependencies, and critical behavior.
Desk Checking#Test Design & Coverage
A manual review in which an author or peer steps through logic, calculations, or code without executing the software.
Desktop Application Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing software installed on desktop operating systems, including installation, permissions, updates, local resources, and platform integration.
Determinism#Core Testing Concepts
The property that the same initial state and inputs produce the same observable outcome, improving repeatability and diagnosis.
Development Environment#Test Data & Environments
An environment used by engineers to build, run, and debug changes before shared validation.
Device Farm#Automation & Tooling
A managed pool of real or virtual devices used to run tests across device models, operating systems, and configurations.
Device Fragmentation#Mobile & Device Testing
Variation across device models, screen sizes, hardware, operating systems, vendors, and capabilities that expands mobile test risk.
Device Pixel Ratio (DPR)#Web & Browser Testing
The ratio between physical screen pixels and CSS pixels, which can affect rendering, screenshots, and responsive behavior.
Differential Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that compares outputs from multiple implementations, versions, models, or configurations for the same inputs to reveal inconsistencies.
Dirty Read#Data & Database Testing
A transaction anomaly in which one transaction reads changes another transaction has not committed.
Disaster Recovery (DR)#Reliability & Resilience
Plans, systems, and procedures for restoring critical services and data after a major disruptive event.
Disaster Recovery Testing#Reliability & Resilience
Exercises that verify recovery sites, backups, dependencies, communications, roles, RTOs, and RPOs under realistic disruption.
Disk I/O#Performance & Scalability
Read and write activity involving storage devices, often measured for rate, latency, queue depth, and saturation.
Distributed Load Testing#Performance & Scalability
Performance testing that coordinates multiple load generators to create traffic beyond one generator's capacity or from several locations.
Distributed Tracing#Observability & Diagnostics
Following a request across services by linking spans that represent its component operations.
DOM Mutation#Web & Browser Testing
A change to document nodes, attributes, text, or structure after the page has loaded.
DOM Snapshot#Web & Browser Testing
A captured representation of document structure and state at a specific time for diagnosis, comparison, or evidence.
Domain Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that partitions an input or output domain and concentrates cases on boundaries, interactions, and representative values.
Downtime#Reliability & Resilience
A period when a service is unavailable or fails to provide an acceptable result to users.
Drag-and-Drop Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing pointer or touch interactions that move an item, including valid targets, cancellation, keyboard alternatives, and edge boundaries.
Dragging Movements#Accessibility Testing
A WCAG 2.2 concept requiring a simple pointer alternative when functionality depends on dragging, unless dragging is essential.
Dummy#Automation & Tooling
A test double passed to satisfy an interface but not used meaningfully by the code under test.
Duplicate Content#SEO & Web Quality
Substantially similar content available at multiple URLs, which can confuse indexing and ranking signals if not handled intentionally.
Duplicate Defect#Defect Management
A report that refers to the same underlying problem as an existing canonical defect.
Duplicate Rate#Metrics & Reporting
The proportion of submitted findings identified as duplicates of existing or simultaneously reported defects.
Duplicate Record Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing detection, prevention, merging, and downstream handling of records that should not appear more than once.
Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)#Security Testing
Testing a running application through its exposed interfaces to detect security defects in observed behavior.
Dynamic Testing#Core Testing Concepts
Testing that evaluates software behavior by executing the test object with selected inputs and conditions.

E46 terms

Edge Case#Core Testing Concepts
A valid or invalid situation near the limit of expected operation where defects are more likely to appear.
ELT Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing pipelines that extract and load data before transforming it in the target system.
Embedded Software Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing software integrated into dedicated hardware, often involving real-time behavior, resource constraints, safety, and hardware interfaces.
Emulator#Automation & Tooling
Software that reproduces another device or system closely enough to run its software and test platform-specific behavior.
End-State Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Scoring an agent primarily by the final application or environment state it produces, regardless of the exact path taken.
End-to-End Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing a complete user or business flow across the integrated components and external dependencies that support it.
Endpoint Discovery#API & Service Testing
Identifying available API paths, operations, versions, parameters, and exposed interfaces for testing or security review.
Endurance Testing#Test Types & Levels
Performance testing that applies a sustained workload to reveal degradation, leaks, accumulation, or stability problems over time.
Entity Integrity#Data & Database Testing
Database rules ensuring that each row has a valid, unique primary identity.
Entry Criteria#Test Planning & Governance
Conditions that should be satisfied before a test activity, level, phase, or release evaluation begins.
Environment Drift#Test Data & Environments
Change over time that makes a test environment differ from its documented or intended baseline.
Environment Fingerprint#Defect Management
A compact record of build, configuration, platform, dependencies, data, browser, device, region, and other conditions relevant to a result.
Environment Parity#Test Data & Environments
The degree to which test and production environments match in behaviorally important configuration, topology, dependencies, and data shape.
Environment Reset#Agentic & AI Testing
Restoring a test environment to a known baseline so an agent run can start independently and be reproduced.
Environment Variable#Test Data & Environments
A named value supplied by the operating environment to configure application or test behavior.
Ephemeral Environment#Test Data & Environments
A short-lived environment created on demand for a branch, change, test run, or review and removed afterward.
Equivalence Partitioning#Test Design & Coverage
A black-box technique that divides a data domain into classes expected to behave similarly and tests representative values from each class.
Error#Core Testing Concepts
A human action or decision that produces an incorrect result and may introduce a defect into a work product.
Error Budget#Reliability & Resilience
The permitted amount of unreliability over a period, commonly calculated as one minus the service-level objective.
Error Fingerprint#Observability & Diagnostics
A normalized signature derived from exception type, message, stack, location, or context to identify recurring failures.
Error Guessing#Test Design & Coverage
An experience-based technique that targets likely failures using tester knowledge, intuition, defect history, and common mistake patterns.
Error Identification#Accessibility Testing
Accessibility support that clearly identifies an input error and describes it in text for the user.
Error Prevention#Quality Attributes & UX
Product design or process measures that reduce the chance of users or systems making mistakes.
Error Rate#Performance & Scalability
The proportion or rate of operations that fail according to defined success criteria.
Error Recovery#Quality Attributes & UX
The ability of an interface or system to help users recognize, correct, and recover from mistakes without losing necessary work.
Error Suggestion#Accessibility Testing
Accessibility support that offers a known correction when input is invalid and the suggestion does not create security or purpose conflicts.
Escaped Defect#Defect Management
A defect discovered after the phase or release in which it was expected to be detected.
ETL Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing pipelines that extract data, transform it according to rules, and load it into a target system.
Evals#Agentic & AI Testing
Repeatable tests and measurements used to assess AI system behavior against defined tasks, datasets, graders, and success criteria.
Evaluation Awareness#Agentic & AI Testing
Behavior change caused when a model or agent recognizes or infers that it is being evaluated.
Evaluation Dataset#Agentic & AI Testing
A controlled set of tasks, inputs, expected properties, and labels used to measure a model or agent.
Evaluation Harness#Agentic & AI Testing
The software and configuration that supplies tasks, tools, prompts, budgets, environments, and scoring for an AI evaluation.
Evaluation Probe#Agentic & AI Testing
An automated measurement component that inspects an agent output, action, claim, or trace against a defined rubric or trusted evidence.
Evaluation Versioning#Agentic & AI Testing
Tracking changes to tasks, harnesses, rubrics, graders, budgets, and datasets so evaluation results remain interpretable.
Event#Observability & Diagnostics
A timestamped record that something meaningful happened in a system.
Event-Driven Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing systems that communicate through events, with attention to ordering, duplication, loss, retries, schemas, and eventual outcomes.
Eventual Consistency Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing that replicated or asynchronous state converges correctly within the allowed time and handles intermediate states safely.
Evidence Chain#Agentic & AI Testing
A connected sequence from observed behavior through captured artifacts to the finding and its supporting conclusion.
Evidence Completeness#Metrics & Reporting
The degree to which a result includes enough context, steps, artifacts, versions, and environment detail for review and reproduction.
Evidence-Grounded Finding#Agentic & AI Testing
A reported issue whose claims are directly supported by reproducible steps, captured state, logs, screenshots, traces, or other artifacts.
Exception#Observability & Diagnostics
A runtime event indicating an error or unusual condition that interrupts normal control flow or requires special handling.
Exit Criteria#Test Planning & Governance
Measurable conditions used to decide whether a test activity, test level, or release evaluation can be concluded.
Expected Result#Core Testing Concepts
The predicted observable behavior or output derived from requirements, models, business rules, or another trusted oracle.
Experience-Based Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing in which design and execution rely strongly on the tester's skills, domain knowledge, intuition, and defect history.
Explicit Wait#Automation & Tooling
A test command that waits until a defined condition is true or a timeout expires before continuing.
Exploratory Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing in which learning, test design, and execution occur together as the tester investigates the product and adapts to findings.

F51 terms

Factuality Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Assessment of whether AI-generated claims are accurate according to trusted evidence.
Fail#Core Testing Concepts
A test outcome indicating that observed behavior did not satisfy one or more expected results or acceptance conditions.
Failback#Reliability & Resilience
The controlled return of workload from a failover resource to the original or preferred resource after recovery.
Failover Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that verifies service continuity and state handling when processing moves from a failed component to a standby or alternate resource.
Failure#Core Testing Concepts
An event in which a system or component does not perform a required function within specified limits.
Failure Clustering#Automation & Tooling
Automatic grouping of failed tests or agent findings that appear to share the same symptom or underlying cause.
Failure Explanation#Agentic & AI Testing
A concise, evidence-based account of what failed, under which conditions, and why the behavior matters.
Failure Mode#Reliability & Resilience
A specific way in which a component, service, process, or user journey can fail.
Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)#Reliability & Resilience
A structured method for identifying potential failure modes, their effects, causes, controls, and priorities.
Failure Rate#Metrics & Reporting
The proportion or frequency of executed tests, requests, transactions, or user journeys that do not meet success criteria.
Failure Trend#Metrics & Reporting
The change in failed executions or failure categories across builds, time, components, or environments.
Fairness Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Evaluation of outcome quality and error rates across relevant people, groups, languages, regions, or usage contexts.
Fake#Automation & Tooling
A working but simplified test implementation, such as an in-memory repository, used instead of a production dependency.
False Fail#Defect Management
A test result reported as failed even though the product behavior is acceptable.
False Negative#Defect Management
A result that incorrectly indicates no defect or risk when one is actually present.
False Pass#Defect Management
A test result reported as passed even though the product contains behavior that should have failed the check.
False Positive#Defect Management
A result that reports a defect or risk that is not actually present.
Fault#Core Testing Concepts
The underlying incorrect code, data, configuration, design, or documentation that can cause a failure when activated.
Fault Injection Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that deliberately introduces failures or adverse conditions to evaluate detection, containment, recovery, and resilience.
Feature Coverage#Test Design & Coverage
The proportion of planned product features or behaviors exercised by a defined test set.
Feature Flag#Test Data & Environments
A runtime control that enables or changes functionality without requiring a new code deployment.
Feedback Time#Metrics & Reporting
Elapsed time from a change or test trigger until useful quality results are available to the people who need them.
File Download Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing downloaded content, filename, type, size, integrity, authorization, error handling, and browser behavior.
File Upload Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing file selection, type and size validation, transfer, progress, cancellation, storage, scanning, and error handling.
First Contentful Paint (FCP)#SEO & Web Quality
A web performance metric measuring when the browser first renders text, an image, or another content element.
First Input Delay (FID)#SEO & Web Quality
A retired Web Vital that measured delay for a user's first interaction and has been replaced by INP in Core Web Vitals.
Fix Verification#Defect Management
Testing that confirms a defect's corrective change resolves the reported behavior in the intended build and conditions.
Fixed Defect#Defect Management
A defect for which a corrective change has been implemented and is awaiting or has passed verification.
Fixed Version#Defect Management
The product version, build, commit, or release expected to contain the verified correction for a defect.
Fixture#Automation & Tooling
A known set of objects, data, files, services, or state prepared for a test.
Flake Rate#Metrics & Reporting
The proportion of test executions that produce inconsistent outcomes without a relevant product change.
Flaky Test#CI/CD & Release Quality
A test that sometimes passes and sometimes fails under equivalent conditions because of instability in the test, environment, or system.
Flame Graph#Observability & Diagnostics
A visualization of aggregated stack samples that shows which call paths consume CPU time or other profiled resources.
Flashing Content Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing visual content for flashes that could trigger photosensitive seizures or create other accessibility barriers.
Focus Appearance#Accessibility Testing
The visual size, contrast, and persistence of a keyboard focus indicator.
Focus Indicator#Accessibility Testing
A visible cue showing which interactive element currently receives keyboard input.
Focus Management#Accessibility Testing
Programmatic and visual handling of keyboard focus during navigation, dynamic updates, dialogs, and errors.
Focus Not Obscured#Accessibility Testing
A WCAG 2.2 requirement that the focused component is not entirely hidden by author-created content.
Focus Order#Accessibility Testing
The sequence in which interactive elements receive focus, expected to preserve meaning and operability.
Focus Trap#Accessibility Testing
A defect in which keyboard focus cannot leave a component, except when containment is intentional and an accessible exit is provided.
Foreign Key Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing referential constraints and behavior when related records are inserted, updated, deleted, migrated, or missing.
Form Label Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing whether every input has a meaningful, correctly associated label that remains available to assistive technology.
Form Validation Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing required fields, formats, ranges, relationships, error messages, preservation, and both client- and server-side enforcement.
Formal Verification#Test Design & Coverage
The use of mathematical methods to prove that a model or implementation satisfies specified properties under stated assumptions.
Framework#Automation & Tooling
A reusable structure of conventions, libraries, configuration, and utilities that supports consistent test development and execution.
Front-End Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing browser-delivered user interfaces, client logic, rendering, interactions, accessibility, and integration with services.
Function Coverage#Test Design & Coverage
The percentage of defined functions, methods, procedures, or operations invoked at least once by a test suite.
Functional Correctness#Quality Attributes & UX
The degree to which a product produces correct results with the required precision for specified inputs and conditions.
Functional Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that evaluates what a system does by checking functions, business rules, inputs, outputs, and user-visible behavior.
Functional Website Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing website features, forms, navigation, business rules, data, and integrations against expected behavior.
Fuzz Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that supplies malformed, unexpected, or generated inputs to expose crashes, hangs, security weaknesses, and robustness defects.

G18 terms

Game Day#Reliability & Resilience
A planned operational exercise that rehearses failure scenarios, incident response, communication, and recovery in a controlled setting.
Garbage Collection Pause#Performance & Scalability
A period in which automatic memory management delays application work while reclaiming or reorganizing memory.
Gauge Metric#Observability & Diagnostics
A metric representing a value that can rise or fall, such as current memory use, queue depth, or active sessions.
Gesture Testing#Mobile & Device Testing
Testing taps, swipes, pinches, rotations, long presses, and multi-touch behavior across supported devices.
Goal-Driven Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing organized around an outcome an agent should achieve, allowing it to choose the path and checks dynamically.
Golden Dataset#Agentic & AI Testing
A carefully reviewed dataset of inputs and trusted labels or outcomes used as a high-confidence evaluation reference.
Golden Master Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that stores trusted output from existing behavior and compares future output against that reference to detect change.
Golden Signals#Observability & Diagnostics
A common service-monitoring set covering latency, traffic, errors, and saturation.
Graceful Degradation#Reliability & Resilience
The ability to preserve essential service with reduced functionality or quality when dependencies or resources fail.
Grader Agreement#Agentic & AI Testing
The extent to which multiple human or model graders assign the same result to identical evaluation items.
GraphQL Authorization Testing#Security Testing
Testing access control at operation, object, field, relationship, and tenant boundaries in a GraphQL API.
GraphQL Query Validation#API & Service Testing
Checking whether a GraphQL operation is syntactically correct and valid against the service schema before execution.
GraphQL Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing GraphQL queries, mutations, subscriptions, schema rules, authorization, errors, and performance.
Gray-Box Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing informed by partial knowledge of internal design, data, or architecture while still validating behavior through external interfaces.
Ground Truth#Agentic & AI Testing
A trusted reference label, state, measurement, or outcome used to judge the correctness of a prediction or test result.
Groundedness Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Assessment of whether an AI output is supported by the context, sources, or application evidence available for the task.
gRPC Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing RPC methods, protobuf contracts, metadata, streaming, status codes, deadlines, and service compatibility.
GUI Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing graphical user interface elements, interactions, states, layout, and visible feedback.

H20 terms

Hallucination Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Evaluation designed to reveal unsupported or fabricated model claims, observations, citations, or actions.
Happy Path#Core Testing Concepts
The primary flow in which valid inputs and expected conditions allow a user to complete a goal successfully.
Hardware Utilization#Performance & Scalability
The measured consumption of CPU, memory, storage, network, accelerator, or other physical resources.
Headed Browser#Automation & Tooling
A browser automation mode that displays the graphical interface during test execution.
Heading Hierarchy#SEO & Web Quality
The semantic nesting of page headings that communicates content structure to users, assistive technology, and search engines.
Heading Structure Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing whether headings accurately label sections and form a logical hierarchy for navigation and comprehension.
Headless Browser#Automation & Tooling
A browser that runs without a visible graphical window, commonly used for fast automated testing in CI.
Health Check#Reliability & Resilience
A diagnostic check reporting whether a component is functioning sufficiently for a defined purpose.
High Availability#Reliability & Resilience
A design and operating objective that minimizes service interruption through redundancy, failover, maintenance practices, and rapid recovery.
Histogram Metric#Observability & Diagnostics
A metric that groups observations into value ranges, supporting distribution and percentile analysis.
Holdout Set#Agentic & AI Testing
Evaluation data kept separate from development and tuning so it provides a less biased estimate of real performance.
Hook#Automation & Tooling
Automation code that runs at a defined lifecycle point, such as before each test, after failure, or after a suite.
hreflang Testing#SEO & Web Quality
Testing language and regional annotations so search engines serve the correct localized URL and reciprocal links are valid.
HTTP Archive (HAR)#Observability & Diagnostics
A structured file containing browser network requests, responses, headers, timing, and related metadata for diagnosis.
HTTP Header Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing request and response headers for correctness, security, caching, negotiation, tracing, and interoperability.
HTTP Redirect#SEO & Web Quality
A response that instructs a client to retrieve or use a different URL.
HTTP Status Code#API & Service Testing
A three-digit HTTP response code that communicates the general result of processing a request.
Human Grader#Agentic & AI Testing
A person who applies a defined rubric to judge model or agent outputs and provide trusted labels.
Hybrid Mobile App#Mobile & Device Testing
A mobile application that combines web technologies with a native container and device integrations.
Hydration Mismatch#Web & Browser Testing
A difference between server-rendered HTML and the client application's expected render, which may cause warnings or incorrect UI.

I31 terms

Idempotency#API & Service Testing
The property that repeating an operation has the same intended effect as performing it once.
Idempotent Test#Automation & Tooling
A test that can be repeated without unintended cumulative effects and produces the same valid state from the same starting conditions.
Identity Management Testing#Security Testing
Testing account creation, lifecycle, identifiers, roles, provisioning, deprovisioning, and identity-related privacy controls.
Iframe Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing content embedded in an inline frame, including loading, sizing, focus, origin boundaries, messaging, and security restrictions.
Implicit Wait#Automation & Tooling
A global browser automation setting that repeatedly searches for an element for a limited time before failing.
In Scope#Test Planning & Governance
Features, risks, platforms, interfaces, and quality attributes explicitly included in a testing effort.
Incident#Defect Management
An unplanned interruption, degradation, or harmful event that requires operational response and may originate from one or more defects.
Inconclusive Result#Core Testing Concepts
A test outcome that cannot be classified as pass or fail because evidence is missing, execution was blocked, or the environment was invalid.
Incremental Testing#Automation & Tooling
Testing focused on the newly changed or newly integrated parts of a system while retaining enough regression protection.
Independent Testing#Test Planning & Governance
Testing performed with organizational, technical, or cognitive separation from the people who created the test object.
Indexability#SEO & Web Quality
The degree to which a search engine is permitted and able to include a page in its index.
Infrastructure as Code Testing#CI/CD & Release Quality
Testing infrastructure definitions for syntax, policy, security, dependencies, drift risk, and deployable behavior.
Infrastructure Security Testing#Security Testing
Testing cloud, network, identity, host, container, and infrastructure configuration against defined security requirements and expected controls.
Inspection#Test Design & Coverage
A formal peer review with defined roles, preparation, criteria, defect logging, and follow-up.
Installation Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing installers, packages, prerequisites, permissions, defaults, upgrades, rollback, and uninstallation across supported environments.
Instrumentation#Observability & Diagnostics
Code or configuration that makes a system emit telemetry such as traces, metrics, logs, or profiles.
Integration Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing interactions, interfaces, and data flow between combined components, services, systems, or external dependencies.
Intelligent Test Automation#Agentic & AI Testing
Automation that uses models, heuristics, or adaptive algorithms to improve test design, execution, selection, or maintenance.
Intent Coverage#Agentic & AI Testing
The degree to which tests exercise the distinct user goals, business intents, and requested outcomes a product is expected to support.
Intent-Based Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing specified through user or business intent while an agent determines concrete actions, data, and checks.
Inter-Rater Reliability#Agentic & AI Testing
A statistical measure of how consistently independent graders evaluate the same items.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)#SEO & Web Quality
A Core Web Vital that measures page responsiveness across user interactions by observing interaction latency.
Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST)#Security Testing
Security analysis that observes a running application from inside the process while tests exercise it.
Interface Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing the exchange of data, control, errors, and timing across a defined interface between components or systems.
Intermittent Defect#Defect Management
A defect that produces a failure only under certain timing, load, state, data, hardware, or environmental conditions.
Internationalization Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing whether a product can support multiple languages, scripts, regions, calendars, currencies, and cultural conventions without redesign.
Interruption Testing#Mobile & Device Testing
Testing mobile behavior during calls, alarms, notifications, lock and unlock, connectivity changes, and app switching.
Invalid Defect#Defect Management
A reported issue determined not to represent a product defect, such as expected behavior, user error, or an invalid environment.
IoT Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing connected devices and their firmware, networks, cloud services, mobile apps, protocols, power behavior, and physical-world interactions.
Isolation Level#Data & Database Testing
A database setting that controls which concurrent transaction changes can be observed and which anomalies are prevented.

J6 terms

JavaScript Error#Web & Browser Testing
A runtime exception or unhandled rejection in browser code that may break functionality or degrade the experience.
JavaScript SEO Testing#SEO & Web Quality
Testing whether client-rendered content, links, metadata, and structured data are available to search-engine rendering and indexing.
Jitter#Performance & Scalability
Variation in latency, timing, or packet arrival that can affect real-time systems and tail performance.
JSON Schema Validation#API & Service Testing
Checking JSON instances against defined types, required properties, formats, ranges, and structural constraints.
JSON Web Token Testing#Security Testing
Testing token signatures, algorithms, claims, expiry, audience, issuer, key handling, replay resistance, and authorization use.
JUnit XML#Metrics & Reporting
A widely supported XML format for publishing automated test cases, durations, failures, errors, and skipped outcomes.

K5 terms

Keyboard Accessibility#Accessibility Testing
The ability to operate all relevant functionality through a keyboard or keyboard-equivalent input.
Keyboard Navigation Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing tab order, focus visibility, activation, shortcuts, dialogs, menus, and complete task flows without a pointing device.
Keyboard Trap#Accessibility Testing
A defect that prevents keyboard users from moving focus away from a component using standard navigation methods.
Keyword-Driven Testing#Automation & Tooling
Automation in which tests are assembled from reusable action keywords and data rather than direct low-level code.
Known Issue#Defect Management
A confirmed product limitation or defect that is documented and not yet fully resolved.

L31 terms

Label#Observability & Diagnostics
A key-value dimension used to filter, group, and aggregate metrics, logs, or traces.
Landmark#Accessibility Testing
A semantic page region, such as main, navigation, or search, that helps assistive-technology users navigate efficiently.
Language of Page#Accessibility Testing
Programmatic identification of a page's primary human language so assistive technology can pronounce and process content correctly.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)#SEO & Web Quality
A Core Web Vital measuring when the largest visible content element is rendered, as an indicator of loading experience.
Latency#Performance & Scalability
The elapsed delay between initiating an operation and observing a defined response or completion point.
Latent Defect#Defect Management
A defect present in the product that has not yet caused an observed failure because its triggering conditions have not occurred.
Layout Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing alignment, spacing, sizing, overflow, overlap, clipping, and responsive arrangement across viewports and content variations.
Lead Time for Changes#Metrics & Reporting
Elapsed time from a code change being committed until it is successfully running in production.
Linting#Test Design & Coverage
Automated static checking that flags suspicious code, style violations, likely errors, or unsafe constructs without executing the program.
Live Region#Accessibility Testing
An ARIA mechanism that informs assistive technology about important dynamic content changes without moving focus.
Liveness Probe#Reliability & Resilience
A check that determines whether a running process is healthy enough to continue or should be restarted.
LLM Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Systematic measurement of a language model's capabilities, quality, robustness, safety, latency, and cost on defined tasks.
LLM Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing language-model outputs and applications for correctness, grounding, safety, consistency, robustness, and integration behavior.
Load Generator#Performance & Scalability
Software that creates controlled requests, users, messages, or transactions for performance testing.
Load Profile#Performance & Scalability
The planned shape of workload over time, including rates, concurrency, ramps, peaks, pauses, and traffic mix.
Load Testing#Test Types & Levels
Performance testing that evaluates behavior under expected and peak concurrent workload levels.
Locale Testing#Test Data & Environments
Testing language, formatting, sorting, collation, calendars, currencies, addresses, names, and cultural conventions for a selected locale.
Localization Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing the linguistic and regional adaptation of a product, including translations, formats, layout, sorting, and culturally appropriate content.
Locator#Automation & Tooling
A query that identifies one or more user interface elements for automation and assertions.
Locator Strategy#Automation & Tooling
The ordered approach used to identify UI elements reliably, favoring stable user-facing semantics over fragile implementation details.
Lock Contention#Data & Database Testing
Performance or concurrency degradation caused when multiple operations compete for the same database or application locks.
Log#Observability & Diagnostics
A timestamped record of an event or state emitted by software or infrastructure.
Log Correlation#Observability & Diagnostics
Linking log records to the same request, user journey, trace, service, deployment, or failure.
Log Level#Observability & Diagnostics
A severity or verbosity classification such as debug, info, warning, error, or fatal.
Log Sampling#Observability & Diagnostics
Retaining only a controlled subset of log events to manage volume and cost while preserving useful signal.
Logout Testing#Security Testing
Testing whether logout invalidates relevant sessions and tokens, clears sensitive state, and prevents unauthorized reuse.
Loop Coverage#Test Design & Coverage
The degree to which tests exercise relevant loop behaviors, such as zero, one, typical, boundary, and excessive iterations.
Lost Update#Data & Database Testing
A concurrency anomaly in which one write unintentionally overwrites another committed change.
Low-Code Testing#Automation & Tooling
Automation built with a mixture of visual configuration, reusable components, and limited custom code.

M44 terms

Machine Learning Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing ML data, pipelines, models, interfaces, metrics, drift, robustness, fairness, and production behavior.
Maintainability Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing or analysis that evaluates how easily software can be understood, diagnosed, modified, and safely verified after change.
Major Defect#Defect Management
A defect with significant impact on an important function but with less urgency or breadth than a critical defect.
Manual Accessibility Testing#Accessibility Testing
Human evaluation of accessibility behavior that automated rules cannot fully determine, including keyboard and assistive-technology use.
Manual Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing in which a person performs or directly controls test activities rather than relying entirely on automated execution.
Matcher#Automation & Tooling
A reusable comparison that determines whether an observed value satisfies an expected pattern, range, state, or predicate.
Materialized View Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing refreshed query results for correctness, freshness, consistency, permissions, and update behavior.
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)#Reliability & Resilience
Average operating time between repairable system failures over an observed period.
Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)#Reliability & Resilience
Average time from the start of a failure until the organization or system detects it.
Mean Time to Failure (MTTF)#Reliability & Resilience
Average operating time before a non-repairable component or instance fails.
Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)#Reliability & Resilience
Average time required to restore acceptable service after a failure begins.
Mean Time to Resolve#Metrics & Reporting
Average elapsed time from defect or issue creation until an accepted resolution is completed.
Memory Leak#Performance & Scalability
Unintended retention of memory that causes usage to grow over time and may eventually degrade or crash the system.
Memory Pressure#Performance & Scalability
A condition in which available memory is low enough to trigger reclaim, paging, throttling, termination, or degraded performance.
Memory Profile#Observability & Diagnostics
A diagnostic view of allocation, retention, object growth, and memory use within a process.
Memory Safety Testing#Security Testing
Testing and analysis for out-of-bounds access, use-after-free, uninitialized memory, leaks, and related memory defects.
Message Queue Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing queued communication for ordering, duplication, loss, delay, retries, dead letters, scaling, and consumer behavior.
Metadata Testing#SEO & Web Quality
Testing page titles, descriptions, social metadata, canonical tags, language hints, and robots directives for correctness and consistency.
Metamorphic Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that checks expected relationships between multiple executions when a direct expected output is difficult to determine.
Metric#Observability & Diagnostics
A numeric measurement recorded over time to describe behavior, performance, capacity, or reliability.
Microservices Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing independently deployable services and their contracts, dependencies, data boundaries, resilience, and end-to-end interactions.
Migration Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that verifies data, configuration, integrations, and behavior when moving between platforms, versions, schemas, or providers.
Minidump#Observability & Diagnostics
A compact process snapshot captured at a crash or failure for later debugging and symbolication.
Minimal Reproducible Example (MRE)#Defect Management
The smallest self-contained setup, data, and action sequence that reliably demonstrates a problem.
Minor Defect#Defect Management
A defect with limited impact that does not materially block a primary user or business outcome.
Misinformation Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Evaluation of whether an AI system creates or amplifies materially false or misleading content under realistic use.
Mobile Accessibility Testing#Mobile & Device Testing
Testing a mobile experience with platform accessibility APIs, screen readers, switch controls, magnification, and alternative input.
Mobile App Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing native, hybrid, or mobile web applications across devices, operating systems, networks, sensors, permissions, and interaction modes.
Mobile Performance Testing#Mobile & Device Testing
Testing startup, rendering, responsiveness, memory, battery, network use, and stability on representative mobile devices.
Mobile Web App#Mobile & Device Testing
A website designed to run in mobile browsers without being installed as a native application.
Mock#Automation & Tooling
A programmable test double that returns controlled behavior and can verify how it was called.
Mock Service#Test Data & Environments
A controlled service implementation that imitates a dependency's interface and selected behavior for testing.
Model Checking#Test Design & Coverage
Automated analysis of a formal system model to determine whether specified properties hold across reachable states.
Model Evals#Agentic & AI Testing
Structured evaluations used to compare model versions, prompts, safeguards, or configurations on defined behavior and quality dimensions.
Model Grader#Agentic & AI Testing
An AI model configured to apply evaluation criteria and produce structured scores, labels, or critiques.
Model-Based Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing in which cases are generated from a model of states, workflows, decisions, data, or expected system behavior.
Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MC/DC)#Test Design & Coverage
Coverage requiring each atomic condition to independently affect its decision outcome while all decision outcomes are exercised.
Multi-Agent Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing performed by multiple coordinated agents with specialized roles such as exploration, execution, verification, or triage.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Testing#Security Testing
Testing enrollment, challenges, recovery, fallback, trusted devices, lockout, and factor independence.
Multi-Tenancy Testing#Test Data & Environments
Testing isolation, configuration, identity, data, limits, performance, and administration across multiple tenants sharing a system.
Multimodal Evidence#Agentic & AI Testing
Combined evidence from screenshots, video, text, DOM state, logs, audio, network data, or structured records.
Multiple Condition Coverage#Test Design & Coverage
Coverage requiring every feasible combination of Boolean condition outcomes within each decision to be exercised.
Mutation Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that makes small artificial code changes and measures whether the existing tests detect those changes.

N20 terms

Name, Role, Value#Accessibility Testing
Core accessibility semantics that identify a control, communicate what it is, and expose its current state or value.
Native Mobile App#Mobile & Device Testing
An application built for and installed on a specific mobile operating system using its platform APIs.
Natural-Language Test Generation#Agentic & AI Testing
Creation of structured or executable tests from goals, requirements, examples, or instructions written in ordinary language.
Negative API Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing APIs with invalid, missing, conflicting, unauthorized, malformed, or out-of-sequence requests.
Negative Testing#Core Testing Concepts
Testing with invalid inputs, missing data, forbidden actions, or adverse conditions to verify safe and informative behavior.
Network Condition Testing#Mobile & Device Testing
Testing behavior under different bandwidth, latency, packet loss, offline, roaming, and connectivity transitions.
Network Interception#Automation & Tooling
Automation that observes, blocks, modifies, or fulfills network requests and responses during a test.
Network Log#Observability & Diagnostics
A record of network connections, requests, responses, protocols, timing, errors, and transfer details.
Network Throttling#Web & Browser Testing
Artificially limiting network speed or adding latency to evaluate behavior under constrained connections.
Network Throughput#Performance & Scalability
The amount of data successfully transferred through a network per unit of time.
Nofollow Attribute#SEO & Web Quality
A link annotation indicating that a crawler should not treat the link as a normal endorsement or ranking signal.
Noindex Directive#SEO & Web Quality
A robots instruction requesting that a search engine not include a page in its index.
Non-determinism#Core Testing Concepts
Variation in outcomes despite apparently identical inputs and starting conditions, often caused by timing, concurrency, randomness, or external dependencies.
Non-Deterministic Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
An evaluation whose score can vary across equivalent runs because of model sampling, graders, environment state, or timing.
Non-Functional Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that evaluates quality attributes such as performance, security, accessibility, reliability, usability, and compatibility.
Non-Repeatable Read#Data & Database Testing
A transaction anomaly in which reading the same row twice returns different committed values within one transaction.
Non-Text Contrast#Accessibility Testing
Visual contrast for controls, states, focus indicators, and meaningful graphics that users need to perceive.
Not Reproducible#Defect Management
A defect status indicating that the reported behavior could not be triggered again with the available information and conditions.
Null Handling Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing missing, unknown, empty, optional, and null values through validation, storage, calculations, display, and interfaces.

O16 terms

OAuth Testing#Security Testing
Testing clients, redirect URIs, scopes, state, PKCE, tokens, consent, refresh, revocation, and authorization-server interactions.
Observability#Observability & Diagnostics
The ability to understand a system's internal state and behavior by examining its external outputs and telemetry.
Offline Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Evaluation performed on a controlled dataset or recorded interactions without exposing the candidate system to live users.
Offline Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing browser or app behavior when network connectivity is absent, intermittent, or restored.
Online Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Evaluation performed on live or newly arriving interactions, often with safeguards, monitoring, and limited exposure.
Open Workload Model#Performance & Scalability
A performance model in which new work arrives independently of how quickly prior work completes.
Open-Loop Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing in which actions are fixed in advance and do not adapt to observations made during execution.
OpenTelemetry#Observability & Diagnostics
An open-source observability framework and standard set of APIs, SDKs, protocols, and tools for telemetry.
Operable#Accessibility Testing
The WCAG principle that user-interface components and navigation must be usable through supported input methods and without inaccessible timing or motion demands.
Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT)#Test Types & Levels
Acceptance testing that evaluates operational readiness, including monitoring, backup, recovery, support, security, and deployment procedures.
Optimistic Locking#Data & Database Testing
A concurrency strategy that detects conflicting updates at write time, commonly using a version value.
Oracle Model#Agentic & AI Testing
A model used to predict or judge the expected outcome of a test when deterministic rules are incomplete or expensive.
Orientation Testing#Mobile & Device Testing
Testing mobile layout, state, media, and interactions when switching between portrait and landscape.
Orphan Page#SEO & Web Quality
A page with no discoverable internal links pointing to it, making it difficult for users and crawlers to find.
Orthogonal Array Testing#Test Design & Coverage
A combinatorial technique that uses balanced experimental arrays to cover factor interactions with relatively few tests.
Out of Scope#Test Planning & Governance
Features, platforms, risks, or quality attributes explicitly excluded from a testing effort and documented as such.

P57 terms

p50 Latency#Performance & Scalability
The median latency, at or below which half of measured operations complete.
p95 Latency#Performance & Scalability
The latency at or below which 95 percent of measured operations complete, highlighting slower user experiences.
p99 Latency#Performance & Scalability
The latency at or below which 99 percent of measured operations complete, commonly used to inspect tail behavior.
Page Experience#SEO & Web Quality
The overall quality of using a web page, including responsiveness, stability, accessibility, security, usability, and content presentation.
Page Load Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing the correctness and timing of navigation, resource loading, rendering, interactivity, errors, and fallback behavior.
Page Object Model (POM)#Automation & Tooling
An automation pattern that represents pages or components as reusable objects containing locators and user-facing actions.
Page Weight#Performance & Scalability
The total transferred size of documents, scripts, styles, images, fonts, and other resources needed for a page.
Pairwise Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Combinatorial testing that covers every relevant pair of input values or configuration factors at least once.
Parallel Testing#Automation & Tooling
Running multiple tests at the same time to shorten feedback time or broaden environment coverage.
Parameterized Test#Automation & Tooling
A test definition executed repeatedly with different argument sets while reusing the same test logic.
Pass#Core Testing Concepts
A test outcome indicating that observed behavior satisfied all evaluated expected results and acceptance conditions.
Pass Rate#Metrics & Reporting
The proportion of completed test executions classified as passed under the defined rules.
Pass@k#Agentic & AI Testing
An evaluation metric measuring whether at least one of k independent attempts successfully completes a task.
Password Policy Testing#Security Testing
Testing password creation, storage, reset, reuse, length, compromised-password handling, and user guidance.
Path Coverage#Test Design & Coverage
The proportion of selected execution paths through a component that a test suite exercises.
Pause, Stop, Hide#Accessibility Testing
An accessibility requirement to let users control certain moving, blinking, scrolling, or auto-updating content.
PDF Accessibility Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing PDF tags, reading order, headings, language, alternatives, tables, links, forms, and keyboard behavior.
Peer Review#Test Design & Coverage
An examination of a work product by colleagues to identify defects, improve clarity, and assess conformance before or without execution.
Perceivable#Accessibility Testing
The WCAG principle that information and user-interface components must be presented in ways users can perceive.
Percentile#Performance & Scalability
A value below which a stated percentage of observations falls, useful for describing latency distributions.
Performance Baseline#Performance & Scalability
A repeatable set of performance results used to detect change across builds, environments, or configurations.
Performance Benchmark#Performance & Scalability
A controlled measurement used to compare performance across versions, systems, configurations, or competitors.
Performance Budget#Performance & Scalability
A limit for metrics such as page weight, latency, script time, requests, or resource use that guards user experience.
Performance Profiling#Performance & Scalability
Measurement of where code spends time and resources so hotspots and bottlenecks can be identified.
Performance Testing#Performance & Scalability
Testing that measures responsiveness, throughput, resource use, stability, and scalability under defined workloads.
Permission Testing#Mobile & Device Testing
Testing app behavior when permissions are granted, denied, limited, revoked, or changed while the app is running.
Pessimistic Locking#Data & Database Testing
A concurrency strategy that locks data before change to prevent conflicting operations.
Phantom Read#Data & Database Testing
A transaction anomaly in which repeating a query returns a changed set of rows because another transaction inserted or deleted matching data.
Pipeline Stage#CI/CD & Release Quality
A logical phase in a pipeline, such as build, test, security, package, deploy, or verify.
Pixel Comparison#Web & Browser Testing
Visual testing that compares corresponding pixels in current and baseline images using a configured tolerance.
Pointer Cancellation#Accessibility Testing
Accessible interaction behavior that allows users to avoid or undo accidental pointer activation where practical.
Pointer Gesture Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing that functionality requiring complex or multipoint gestures also has a simple, accessible alternative when required.
Policy Compliance Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing that checks whether an AI system's outputs and actions follow defined organizational, legal, safety, and usage policies.
Polling#Automation & Tooling
Repeatedly checking a condition at intervals until it becomes true or a timeout is reached.
Portability Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing how effectively a product can be transferred, installed, adapted, or replaced across supported environments.
Positive Testing#Core Testing Concepts
Testing with valid inputs and expected conditions to confirm that intended behavior succeeds.
Post-Deployment Testing#CI/CD & Release Quality
Testing after a deployment to verify critical behavior, integrations, configuration, data, and user impact.
Postcondition#Core Testing Concepts
A required or expected system state after a test case or test step has completed.
Pre-Commit Testing#CI/CD & Release Quality
Fast local checks run before a change is committed, such as unit tests, linting, formatting, or secret detection.
Precondition#Core Testing Concepts
A state, dependency, permission, or data condition that must exist before a test can be executed meaningfully.
Preproduction Environment#Test Data & Environments
A shared environment intended to approximate production closely enough for final technical and operational validation.
Preview Environment#Test Data & Environments
An on-demand deployable environment that lets stakeholders review and test a specific branch or change before merge.
Primary Key Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing uniqueness, non-null behavior, generation, migration, and use of database primary identifiers.
Product Risk#Test Planning & Governance
The possibility that a product may fail to meet quality expectations and cause harm to users, operations, finances, security, or reputation.
Production Environment#Test Data & Environments
The live environment that serves real users or business operations.
Production Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Measurement of model or agent behavior using controlled evidence from real operating conditions and user workflows.
Production Monitoring#Observability & Diagnostics
Continuous observation of live service health, behavior, errors, performance, security, and user impact.
Production Testing#Test Types & Levels
Controlled testing performed in a live environment using safeguards that limit user, data, and service risk.
Production Verification Testing (PVT)#CI/CD & Release Quality
A small, controlled test set run in production to confirm critical behavior after deployment.
Programmatically Determined#Accessibility Testing
Information encoded so software and assistive technology can identify it from markup, properties, or relationships.
Project Risk#Test Planning & Governance
The possibility that planning, staffing, tools, environments, dependencies, or schedule problems will hinder testing or delivery.
Property-Based Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that generates many inputs and checks general properties or invariants instead of relying only on hand-written examples.
Protocol Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing conformance, sequencing, framing, errors, timing, and interoperability for a communication protocol.
Provider Verification#API & Service Testing
Execution of consumer expectations against an API provider to confirm that the provider still satisfies its contracts.
Pseudo-Oracle#Test Design & Coverage
An independent implementation, model, or heuristic used to approximate expected results when a definitive oracle is unavailable.
Pseudonymization#Test Data & Environments
Replacing direct identifiers with controlled substitutes while retaining a separately protected means of re-identification.
Push Notification Testing#Mobile & Device Testing
Testing notification registration, delivery, permission, content, actions, routing, foreground and background behavior, and expiry.

Q8 terms

QA Automation#Automation & Tooling
Automation of testing and other quality-assurance activities to increase repeatability, speed, coverage, and feedback.
Quality Assurance (QA)#Core Testing Concepts
Planned, systematic activities that build confidence that processes and products will satisfy quality requirements.
Quality Control (QC)#Core Testing Concepts
Product-focused activities that evaluate outputs, detect defects, and determine whether defined quality criteria are met.
Quality Dashboard#Metrics & Reporting
A concise view of testing, defects, risk, coverage, reliability, and release signals used for decisions.
Quality Engineering#Core Testing Concepts
An engineering discipline that integrates prevention, testability, automation, observability, and feedback to build quality throughout delivery.
Quality Gate#Test Planning & Governance
A decision checkpoint that blocks or permits progression based on defined evidence, thresholds, approvals, and unresolved risks.
Queue Depth#Performance & Scalability
The number of requests, messages, or tasks waiting for processing at a point in time.
Queue Time#Performance & Scalability
Time spent waiting for a resource, worker, connection, lock, or processing slot before service begins.

R76 terms

Ramp-Down#Performance & Scalability
The controlled reduction of workload near the end of a performance test or scenario phase.
Ramp-Up#Performance & Scalability
The controlled increase of workload over time until a target rate or concurrency is reached.
Random Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that selects inputs or action sequences using a random or statistically controlled process.
Rate Limiting#API & Service Testing
A control that restricts the number or cost of requests allowed for a client, identity, resource, or time window.
Readiness Probe#Reliability & Resilience
A check that determines whether a service instance is prepared to receive traffic.
Reading Order#Accessibility Testing
The meaningful sequence in which content is presented to assistive technology and keyboard users.
Real Device Testing#Mobile & Device Testing
Testing on physical hardware to observe actual sensors, graphics, radios, power behavior, performance, and platform differences.
Real User Monitoring (RUM)#Observability & Diagnostics
Collection of performance and experience measurements from actual user sessions in production.
Recorded Test Trace#Automation & Tooling
A replayable record of test actions, browser state, network activity, timing, logs, and captured evidence.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)#Reliability & Resilience
The maximum acceptable amount of data loss expressed as time before a disruption.
Recovery Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that verifies restoration of service, data, transactions, and dependencies after failures or interruptions.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)#Reliability & Resilience
The target maximum time for restoring a service or business capability after disruption.
RED Method#Observability & Diagnostics
A service-monitoring approach focused on request rate, errors, and duration.
Redirect Chain#SEO & Web Quality
A sequence in which one URL redirects to another redirect before reaching the final destination.
Redirect Loop#SEO & Web Quality
A cycle of redirects that prevents the client from reaching a final resource.
Redirect Testing#SEO & Web Quality
Testing redirect status, destination, method handling, query preservation, loops, chains, security, and canonical intent.
Reduced Motion Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing that motion and animation respect user preferences and do not create avoidable vestibular or cognitive barriers.
Reflow Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing that content remains readable and operable without two-dimensional scrolling at required viewport and zoom conditions.
Refusal Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Evaluation of whether an AI system appropriately refuses prohibited requests without rejecting allowed, benign tasks unnecessarily.
Regression Eval#Agentic & AI Testing
A repeatable evaluation used to detect behavior or quality regressions after changes to a model, prompt, tool, or agent workflow.
Regression Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing after change to detect unintended impact on behavior that previously worked.
Regulatory Acceptance Testing#Test Types & Levels
Acceptance testing that demonstrates compliance with laws, regulations, or mandatory industry rules before approval or release.
Release Candidate#CI/CD & Release Quality
A build considered potentially ready for release pending final validation and approval.
Release Criteria#Test Planning & Governance
The measurable quality, risk, coverage, operational, and approval conditions required before a product can be released.
Release Observability#CI/CD & Release Quality
Telemetry and analysis focused on comparing behavior, errors, performance, and user impact before, during, and after a release.
Release Readiness#CI/CD & Release Quality
The evidence-based assessment that quality, risk, operations, compliance, support, and rollback conditions are sufficient for release.
Release Testing#CI/CD & Release Quality
Testing focused on whether a specific build and its complete release package are suitable for deployment.
Reliability#Quality Attributes & UX
The degree to which a system performs specified functions under stated conditions for the required period.
Reliability Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that evaluates consistent operation, failure behavior, fault tolerance, availability, and recovery over time.
Remote Browser#Automation & Tooling
A browser running on another machine or managed service and controlled through a network automation protocol.
Rendered HTML#SEO & Web Quality
The document content and structure available after server rendering and any client-side JavaScript execution.
Reopened Defect#Defect Management
A previously resolved or closed defect returned to active work because the issue remains, recurs, or was not fully addressed.
Replication Lag#Data & Database Testing
The delay between a change on a source database and its appearance on a replica.
Reproducibility Rate#Metrics & Reporting
The proportion of reported findings that can be triggered again using their documented steps and conditions.
Reproduction Rate#Defect Management
How often a defect occurs across repeated attempts under defined conditions.
Reproduction Steps#Defect Management
The ordered actions, data, and setup required to trigger an observed defect.
Request Rate#Performance & Scalability
The number of requests arriving at or completed by a service per unit of time.
Request Validation#API & Service Testing
Checking an incoming request's structure, types, required fields, ranges, permissions, and business rules before processing it.
Requests per Second (RPS)#Performance & Scalability
A throughput measure counting how many requests a system handles each second.
Requirements Coverage#Test Design & Coverage
The proportion of requirements linked to one or more tests, often refined by execution status and risk.
Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM)#Test Planning & Governance
A table connecting requirements with test conditions, test cases, execution results, defects, and other verification evidence.
Requirements-Based Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing in which conditions, cases, coverage, and expected results are derived from documented requirements.
Residual Risk#Test Planning & Governance
Risk that remains after planned controls, tests, fixes, and mitigations have been applied.
Resilience#Reliability & Resilience
The ability of a system to withstand disruption, limit impact, adapt, and recover while preserving critical outcomes.
Resilience Testing#Reliability & Resilience
Testing under faults, dependency failures, overload, network disruption, and recovery to evaluate continued service and containment.
Resolved Defect#Defect Management
A defect for which a disposition or corrective action is complete and ready for verification or closure.
Resource Saturation#Performance & Scalability
A state in which demand approaches or exceeds a resource's effective capacity and additional work queues or fails.
Resource Timing#Web & Browser Testing
Browser measurements for network and loading phases of individual resources such as scripts, images, fonts, and API calls.
Resource Utilization#Performance & Scalability
The proportion of available compute, memory, storage, connection, or network capacity consumed.
Response Time#Performance & Scalability
Elapsed time from sending a request or action until the defined response is received or rendered.
Response Validation#API & Service Testing
Checking an API response's status, headers, schema, values, business rules, timing, and side effects.
Responsive Design Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing that layout, content, interaction, and usability adapt correctly across screen sizes, orientations, zoom levels, and input types.
REST API Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing resource-oriented HTTP APIs for methods, status codes, representations, state changes, errors, and compatibility.
Resumption Criteria#Test Planning & Governance
Conditions that must be met before testing can restart after it has been suspended.
Retesting#Core Testing Concepts
Another execution of a test, commonly to confirm a fix or obtain a result after an earlier blocked or invalid run.
Retry#Automation & Tooling
Automatic re-execution of a failed action or test, usually with limits and evidence that preserves the original failure.
Retry Analysis#Automation & Tooling
Investigation of whether retries are masking flaky tests, unstable environments, real product defects, or insufficient synchronization.
Retry Storm#Reliability & Resilience
A feedback loop in which many clients retry a failing service and make overload or recovery worse.
Review Checklist#Test Design & Coverage
A list of questions, risks, standards, and common defects used to guide a consistent review.
Rich Result Testing#SEO & Web Quality
Testing structured data eligibility and rendering for enhanced search results such as products, events, or breadcrumbs.
Risk Appetite#Test Planning & Governance
The amount and type of quality risk an organization is willing to accept in pursuit of its objectives.
Risk Coverage#Test Design & Coverage
The degree to which identified product risks are addressed by designed and executed tests.
Risk Exposure#Test Planning & Governance
An estimate of risk magnitude, commonly based on the likelihood of a failure and the impact if it occurs.
Risk Mitigation#Test Planning & Governance
An action that reduces the likelihood, impact, or detectability of a quality risk.
Risk-Based Testing#Test Planning & Governance
Testing that prioritizes and tailors effort according to the likelihood and impact of product risks.
robots.txt Testing#SEO & Web Quality
Testing crawler directives for valid syntax, intended allow and disallow rules, sitemap references, and accidental blocking.
Robust#Accessibility Testing
The WCAG principle that content must be interpretable by a wide range of current and future user agents, including assistive technologies.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) Testing#Security Testing
Testing that permissions assigned through roles are correct, complete, minimal, and enforced across every interface.
Root Cause Analysis (RCA)#Observability & Diagnostics
A structured investigation that identifies the underlying and contributing causes of an incident or failure.
Root Cause Hypothesis#Agentic & AI Testing
A proposed explanation for a failure that is explicitly marked as uncertain and linked to supporting and contradicting evidence.
Rounding Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing numeric rounding mode, precision, presentation, aggregation, boundaries, and consistency across components.
Route Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing client or server routes, parameters, guards, redirects, not-found states, and navigation between routes.
Row Count Validation#Data & Database Testing
Comparing expected and actual record counts across data sources, pipeline stages, partitions, or filters.
Rubric-Based Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Evaluation that applies explicit criteria, levels, and scoring guidance to judge outputs or behavior consistently.
Rule-Based Grader#Agentic & AI Testing
A deterministic evaluator that scores output using explicit checks, formulas, schemas, or business rules.
Runner#Automation & Tooling
Software or infrastructure that discovers tests, schedules execution, manages workers, and reports outcomes.

S107 terms

Safety Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing that measures whether an AI system avoids harmful, prohibited, deceptive, or unauthorized behavior.
Safety Guardrail Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Testing whether AI guardrails reliably block prohibited behavior and allow valid tasks across representative scenarios.
Sample Size#Metrics & Reporting
The number of observations included in a metric or evaluation, which affects uncertainty and representativeness.
Sanity Testing#Test Types & Levels
A focused check that a specific change or narrow area behaves plausibly before broader testing continues.
Scalability Curve#Performance & Scalability
A graph showing how throughput, latency, errors, or cost changes as workload or resources increase.
Scalability Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that evaluates how performance and resource use change as workload, data, users, or system capacity grows.
Scenario Generation#Agentic & AI Testing
Automatic creation of realistic users, goals, conditions, data, and event sequences for testing or evaluation.
Scenario Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing realistic sequences of events, roles, data, and conditions that represent how a product is used.
Schema Drift#API & Service Testing
Unplanned divergence between the data or API schema expected by consumers and the schema actually produced.
Schema Evolution#Data & Database Testing
Managed change to a data schema while preserving compatibility, migration safety, and consumer expectations.
Schema Markup Validation#SEO & Web Quality
Checking structured data markup for valid syntax, required properties, supported types, and consistency with visible content.
Schema Migration Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing database structure changes, data conversion, constraints, indexes, rollback, compatibility, and deployment safety.
Schema Validation#API & Service Testing
Checking a request, response, event, or document against its formal structural and type definition.
Screen Magnifier Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing at high zoom and with magnification tools for reflow, focus visibility, overlap, and discoverability.
Screen Reader Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing content and interactions with assistive software that converts accessibility semantics into speech or braille.
Screenplay Pattern#Automation & Tooling
An automation pattern that models actors, tasks, questions, and abilities to express tests around user goals.
Scripted Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing guided by prewritten cases or procedures with defined steps, data, and expected results.
Search Engine Crawler#SEO & Web Quality
Automated software that discovers and retrieves web pages and resources for search-engine processing.
Search-Based Software Testing (SBST)#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that applies optimization algorithms to generate or select tests that maximize goals such as coverage or fault detection.
Secure Code Review#Security Testing
Manual or tool-assisted examination of code for security weaknesses, dangerous assumptions, and missing controls.
Security Header Testing#Security Testing
Testing headers such as CSP, HSTS, frame restrictions, MIME sniffing protection, and referrer policy for correct enforcement.
Security Regression Testing#Security Testing
Repeatable testing that detects the return of known security defects or weakening of previously verified controls.
Security Requirement#Security Testing
A testable statement of protection, trust, identity, privacy, resilience, or compliance that a system must satisfy.
Security Test Case#Security Testing
A defined procedure that evaluates a security requirement, control, or expected protective behavior.
Selector#Automation & Tooling
A query used to target elements in a UI document, such as a CSS selector, XPath expression, role, label, or test identifier.
Self-Healing Test Automation#Automation & Tooling
Automation that adapts selected locators, waits, data, or flows after application changes while preserving intent and auditability.
Semantic HTML#SEO & Web Quality
HTML that uses elements according to their meaning, improving structure, accessibility, maintainability, and search understanding.
Semantic Locator#Automation & Tooling
A locator based on user-facing meaning, such as accessible role, label, name, text, or relationship.
Semantic Test Coverage#Agentic & AI Testing
Coverage measured against meanings such as user intents, business rules, behaviors, and risks rather than only code structure.
Server Error Response#API & Service Testing
An HTTP 5xx response indicating that the server failed to fulfill an otherwise valid request.
Server-Side Performance Testing#Performance & Scalability
Testing service, application, database, queue, and infrastructure behavior under controlled workload.
Server-Side Security Testing#Security Testing
Testing authentication, authorization, validation, data access, business logic, dependencies, and infrastructure behind the client interface.
Server-Side Validation#Web & Browser Testing
Authoritative validation performed by a server regardless of what checks the client interface performs.
Service Level Agreement (SLA)#Reliability & Resilience
A formal commitment between parties defining service expectations and consequences, often including availability or performance targets.
Service Level Indicator (SLI)#Reliability & Resilience
A measured signal representing a user-relevant aspect of service behavior, such as successful-request proportion or latency.
Service Level Objective (SLO)#Reliability & Resilience
A target value or range for an SLI over a defined measurement window.
Service Map#Observability & Diagnostics
A visual or queryable representation of services and dependencies derived from configuration or telemetry.
Service Time#Performance & Scalability
The time a system actively spends processing an operation, excluding time waiting in queues.
Session Management Testing#Security Testing
Testing session creation, identifiers, rotation, storage, scope, expiry, logout, revocation, concurrency, and fixation resistance.
Session Replay#Observability & Diagnostics
A reconstruction of a user's interface interactions from captured events, used to diagnose experience and functional issues.
Session Timeout Testing#Security Testing
Testing idle and absolute session expiry, warnings, state preservation, reauthentication, and token invalidation.
Session-Based Test Management (SBTM)#Test Design & Coverage
A structured exploratory approach that organizes testing into time-boxed sessions with charters, notes, coverage, and debriefs.
Severity Distribution#Metrics & Reporting
The count or proportion of confirmed defects grouped by severity level.
Shadow Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Running a candidate model or agent on real inputs without allowing its outputs to affect users or production decisions.
Shadow Testing#CI/CD & Release Quality
Running a candidate implementation or test system alongside the current one and comparing results without affecting the live outcome.
Sharding#Automation & Tooling
Dividing a test suite into independent partitions that can execute concurrently on separate workers.
Shift-Left Testing#Test Planning & Governance
Moving testing, reviews, risk analysis, and feedback earlier in the development lifecycle.
Shift-Right Testing#Test Planning & Governance
Using production-like or live-system evidence, monitoring, experiments, and controlled tests to evaluate quality after deployment.
Simulation Environment#Agentic & AI Testing
A controlled representation of a real application or system used to test agent behavior without production risk.
Simulator#Automation & Tooling
A system that imitates selected behavior of a device, dependency, network, or environment without reproducing its complete implementation.
Single Point of Failure (SPOF)#Reliability & Resilience
A component or dependency whose failure can remove an entire required service because no effective alternative exists.
Sitemap Validation#SEO & Web Quality
Testing an XML sitemap for accessible, canonical, indexable URLs, valid format, freshness, and correct segmentation.
Skipped Test#Defect Management
A test intentionally not executed because of a condition, configuration, selection rule, or temporary exclusion.
Smart Test Selection#Automation & Tooling
Automated choice of the tests most relevant to a change, risk, failure history, or limited execution budget.
Smoke Testing#Test Types & Levels
A broad, shallow check of critical functions used to determine whether a build is stable enough for further testing.
Snapshot Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that serializes an output representation and compares it with a stored snapshot to detect unexpected change.
Soak Testing#Test Types & Levels
Long-running performance or reliability testing used to uncover leaks, degradation, resource exhaustion, and time-dependent failures.
SOAP API Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing SOAP operations, XML envelopes, WSDL contracts, schemas, faults, headers, and security behavior.
Soft 404#SEO & Web Quality
A page that appears missing or empty but returns a successful status instead of an appropriate not-found response.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)#Security Testing
Automated analysis of third-party and open-source components for known security defects, licenses, provenance, and version risk.
Software Quality#Core Testing Concepts
The degree to which software satisfies stated and implied needs, delivers value, and avoids unacceptable harm or failure.
Software Quality Assurance (SQA)#Core Testing Concepts
Systematic activities that provide confidence software processes and products will meet defined quality requirements.
Software Testing#Core Testing Concepts
The lifecycle process of evaluating software and related work products to reveal defects, measure quality, and reduce decision risk.
Source Code Security Analysis#Security Testing
Automated or manual examination of source code for security defects, unsafe data flow, unsafe APIs, and missing controls.
Source Map#Web & Browser Testing
A mapping from transformed or minified browser code back to original source, enabling readable stack traces and debugging.
Source Revision#Defect Management
The exact commit, tag, branch state, or source identifier used to create the tested build.
Source-to-Target Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing that source data is mapped, transformed, loaded, and represented correctly in its target system.
Span#Observability & Diagnostics
A timed record of one operation within a distributed trace, including context, attributes, events, and status.
Span ID#Observability & Diagnostics
An identifier for one span within a trace.
Specification by Example (SBE)#Test Design & Coverage
A collaborative practice that uses concrete examples to clarify requirements and create shared, testable specifications.
Specification-Based Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that derives cases from requirements, rules, models, interfaces, or other descriptions of expected behavior.
Spike Testing#Test Types & Levels
Performance testing that applies sudden, extreme workload changes to evaluate elasticity, stability, and recovery.
Split-Brain#Reliability & Resilience
A distributed-system failure in which separated nodes both act as the authoritative leader, risking conflicting operations or data.
Spy#Automation & Tooling
A test double that records calls and interactions while optionally delegating to real behavior.
Stack Trace#Observability & Diagnostics
A record of active calls leading to a particular point, exception, or crash in a program.
Staging Environment#Test Data & Environments
A shared environment used to validate integrated software before production release.
Startup Probe#Reliability & Resilience
A check that gives a slow-starting application time to initialize before liveness or readiness rules apply.
State Pollution#Test Data & Environments
Unintended residual data or configuration from one test that changes the behavior of another test.
State Transition Testing#Test Design & Coverage
A black-box technique that derives tests from system states, triggering events, valid transitions, and invalid transitions.
State-Space Exploration#Agentic & AI Testing
Systematic or heuristic traversal of reachable application states and transitions to discover untested behavior.
Statement Coverage#Test Design & Coverage
The percentage of executable statements run at least once by a test suite.
Static Analysis#Test Design & Coverage
Tool-assisted examination of code or other artifacts without executing the software to find defects and maintainability issues.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST)#Security Testing
Analysis of source code, bytecode, or binaries for security weaknesses without executing the application.
Static Testing#Core Testing Concepts
Evaluation of work products without running the software, including reviews, inspections, static analysis, and model checking.
Status Message#Accessibility Testing
Dynamic information about success, errors, progress, or results that can be announced to assistive technology without moving focus.
Steady State#Performance & Scalability
A period in which workload and system behavior are sufficiently stable for meaningful comparison and measurement.
Steady-State Hypothesis#Reliability & Resilience
A measurable expectation of normal system behavior that a chaos experiment attempts to preserve despite introduced faults.
Step-Level Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Scoring individual decisions, actions, tool calls, or intermediate states within an agent trajectory.
Stress Testing#Test Types & Levels
Performance testing beyond expected capacity to identify breaking points, failure modes, and recovery behavior.
Structure-Based Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing derived from internal structure such as control flow, data flow, code, architecture, or call relationships.
Structured Data Testing#SEO & Web Quality
Testing machine-readable page annotations for validity, eligibility, accuracy, and agreement with visible content.
Structured Logging#Observability & Diagnostics
Logging that records events in consistent fields and types so machines can reliably search, correlate, and analyze them.
Stub#Automation & Tooling
A test double that returns predefined responses to calls made by the code under test.
Success Criterion#Agentic & AI Testing
A measurable condition that defines when an agent task or evaluation item has been completed successfully.
Suspension Criteria#Test Planning & Governance
Conditions serious enough to pause a test activity, such as an unusable build, invalid environment, or unacceptable safety risk.
Switch Control Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing an interface with assistive switch input that navigates and activates controls sequentially or through scanning.
Symbolic Execution#Test Design & Coverage
Program analysis that represents inputs as symbols and solves path constraints to identify reachable behaviors and generate tests.
Symbolication#Observability & Diagnostics
Converting machine addresses or minified stack frames into readable function names and source locations.
Symptom#Defect Management
The observable failure, error, or abnormal behavior that indicates a possible underlying defect.
Syntax Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing that generates valid and invalid inputs from a formal grammar or syntax definition.
Synthetic Monitoring#Observability & Diagnostics
Scheduled automated checks that simulate users or requests from controlled locations to detect availability, correctness, or performance problems.
Synthetic Test Data#Test Data & Environments
Artificially generated data designed to represent required patterns and edge cases without copying real sensitive records.
Synthetic User#Agentic & AI Testing
A simulated persona or agent that behaves according to defined goals, context, abilities, and constraints during testing.
System Integration Testing (SIT)#Test Types & Levels
Testing interfaces and interactions between complete systems, external services, platforms, or organizational domains.
System Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing an integrated system as a whole against specified functional and non-functional requirements.
System Testing Agent#Agentic & AI Testing
An AI agent configured to evaluate an integrated system across workflows, interfaces, states, and quality attributes.

T140 terms

Tail Latency#Performance & Scalability
Latency experienced by the slowest portion of operations, commonly examined with high percentiles such as p95 or p99.
Target Size#Accessibility Testing
The visible or interactive area available for activating a control, which should be large and sufficiently separated for reliable use.
Task Replay#Agentic & AI Testing
Re-execution of a recorded task, state, and interaction sequence to reproduce or compare agent behavior.
Task Success#Quality Attributes & UX
A usability measure indicating whether users can complete a defined goal accurately and completely.
Task Success Rate#Agentic & AI Testing
The percentage of evaluation tasks completed according to their defined success criteria.
Technical Review#Test Design & Coverage
A peer review by qualified specialists that assesses technical correctness, feasibility, consistency, and compliance with standards.
Technical SEO Testing#SEO & Web Quality
Testing technical conditions that affect crawling, rendering, indexing, canonicalization, structured data, performance, and mobile usability.
Telemetry#Observability & Diagnostics
Data emitted by systems to describe behavior and state, including traces, metrics, logs, events, and profiles.
Test Account#Test Data & Environments
A controlled identity created for testing roles, permissions, data access, and user journeys.
Test Adaptation#Agentic & AI Testing
Automatic modification of a test plan, path, data, or check in response to observed application state or change.
Test Approach#Test Planning & Governance
The tailored implementation of a test strategy for a specific product, project, release, risk profile, and context.
Test Artifact#Metrics & Reporting
A file or record produced or consumed by testing, such as a script, report, log, screenshot, trace, dataset, or coverage file.
Test Audit#Test Planning & Governance
An independent examination of testing processes, evidence, and controls to assess compliance, completeness, and effectiveness.
Test Automation#Automation & Tooling
Use of software to prepare, execute, evaluate, and report tests or supporting activities.
Test Automation Architecture#Automation & Tooling
The structural design of automation components, interfaces, layers, data, services, runners, and reporting.
Test Automation Coverage#Automation & Tooling
The proportion of selected testing scope executed or supported by automation, interpreted alongside risk and effectiveness.
Test Automation Framework#Automation & Tooling
A reusable implementation of automation architecture that provides conventions, libraries, fixtures, execution, and reporting.
Test Automation Pyramid#Automation & Tooling
A heuristic favoring many fast, isolated low-level tests, fewer service tests, and a smaller number of broad UI tests.
Test Automation Strategy#Automation & Tooling
A plan for where, why, and how automation will provide sustainable value across risks, levels, environments, and delivery workflows.
Test Basis#Core Testing Concepts
The requirements, risks, models, standards, contracts, code, or other information used to design and evaluate tests.
Test Bed#Test Data & Environments
An integrated set of hardware, software, tools, services, data, and instrumentation used for testing.
Test Budget#Test Planning & Governance
The approved time, cost, tooling, infrastructure, and staffing allocation for testing activities.
Test Cache#CI/CD & Release Quality
Stored results or built dependencies reused to avoid rerunning work that is proven unaffected by a change.
Test Case#Core Testing Concepts
A defined set of preconditions, inputs, actions, and expected results created to evaluate a test condition.
Test Case Design#Test Design & Coverage
The activity of converting test conditions, risks, and coverage goals into executable test cases.
Test Case Generation#Test Design & Coverage
The manual or automated creation of test cases from requirements, models, code, data, examples, or observed behavior.
Test Case Prioritization#Test Design & Coverage
Ordering test cases so the most valuable, risky, failure-prone, or change-relevant tests run earlier.
Test Case Selection#Test Design & Coverage
Choosing a subset of available tests for a particular build, risk, platform, change, or time budget.
Test Charter#Test Design & Coverage
A concise mission for an exploratory session that identifies its target, purpose, risks, constraints, and useful starting ideas.
Test Completion#Core Testing Concepts
The point at which agreed exit criteria are evaluated, remaining risks are reported, and testing is formally concluded.
Test Completion Report#Test Planning & Governance
A final summary of executed scope, results, coverage, defects, deviations, residual risk, and recommendations.
Test Compliance#Test Planning & Governance
The degree to which testing activities and evidence satisfy applicable process, policy, contractual, regulatory, or standard requirements.
Test Condition#Core Testing Concepts
A feature, rule, transaction, quality attribute, risk, or other aspect of a test basis that can be evaluated by tests.
Test Condition Design#Test Design & Coverage
The activity of identifying what must be tested from requirements, risks, models, interfaces, and other test-basis information.
Test Control#Test Planning & Governance
Corrective decisions and actions taken when monitoring shows that testing is deviating from plan, goals, or acceptable risk.
Test Coverage#Test Design & Coverage
The degree to which a test suite exercises a defined set of requirements, risks, structures, data, platforms, or behaviors.
Test Cycle#Test Planning & Governance
A planned iteration of preparation, execution, defect handling, and reporting for a build, release, or objective.
Test Data#Core Testing Concepts
Values, files, accounts, records, messages, and system states used as inputs or context during testing.
Test Data Design#Test Design & Coverage
The activity of selecting or generating data that exercises required partitions, boundaries, rules, states, risks, and privacy constraints.
Test Data Management (TDM)#Test Data & Environments
The policies, processes, and tools used to create, protect, provision, refresh, find, and retire test data.
Test Data Provisioning#Test Data & Environments
Supplying the required test data to an environment in a timely, repeatable, authorized, and protected way.
Test Deliverable#Test Planning & Governance
Any planned output of testing, such as a strategy, case set, script, dataset, report, log, defect, or sign-off record.
Test Design Technique#Test Design & Coverage
A systematic method for deriving test conditions, test cases, or test data from a defined source.
Test Double#Automation & Tooling
A substitute for a real dependency used to control or observe interactions during testing.
Test Duration#Metrics & Reporting
Elapsed time required for a test, suite, stage, or complete test run.
Test Effectiveness#Metrics & Reporting
The degree to which testing detects important defects and provides useful risk information for its cost and time.
Test Effort Estimate#Test Planning & Governance
A forecast of the people, time, infrastructure, and cost required to meet defined testing objectives.
Test Engineering#Core Testing Concepts
The design and implementation of testability, automation, environments, data, tooling, and measurement as engineering systems.
Test Environment#Test Data & Environments
The hardware, software, services, network, data, configuration, and tools in which tests are performed.
Test Environment Management#Test Data & Environments
Planning, provisioning, configuring, monitoring, scheduling, refreshing, and retiring environments used for testing.
Test Evidence#Core Testing Concepts
Artifacts that support a test conclusion, including results, logs, screenshots, traces, data, environment details, and reproduction steps.
Test Execution#Core Testing Concepts
The activity of running tests, recording observations, comparing outcomes, and capturing evidence.
Test Execution Progress#Metrics & Reporting
The proportion and status of planned tests that are completed, running, blocked, skipped, passed, or failed.
Test Fixture#Automation & Tooling
The reusable setup, data, objects, or environment state required by one or more automated tests.
Test Generation with AI#Agentic & AI Testing
Use of AI to derive test ideas, scenarios, data, steps, assertions, or executable scripts from available context.
Test Governance#Test Planning & Governance
The decision rights, policies, accountability, oversight, and controls used to direct testing across an organization.
Test Harness#Automation & Tooling
The tools, drivers, stubs, data, configuration, and infrastructure used to execute and observe tests.
Test Hook#Automation & Tooling
A lifecycle extension point where custom setup, cleanup, logging, screenshots, retries, or reporting can run.
Test Impact Analysis#Automation & Tooling
Analysis that maps a change to affected components, requirements, risks, and tests to focus regression effort.
Test Independence#Test Planning & Governance
The degree of separation between testing and the people, assumptions, tools, or organizational pressures involved in development.
Test Isolation#Automation & Tooling
The property that a test does not depend on or unintentionally alter the outcome of other tests.
Test Item#Core Testing Concepts
A specific part of a test object selected for testing, such as a component, document, model, or build.
Test Lab#Test Data & Environments
A controlled physical or virtual collection of devices, systems, networks, and tools maintained for testing.
Test Level#Test Planning & Governance
A group of testing activities managed together and associated with a development level, such as component, integration, system, or acceptance testing.
Test Management#Test Planning & Governance
Planning, estimating, monitoring, controlling, and reporting testing while coordinating people, risks, environments, data, tools, and defects.
Test Maturity#Test Planning & Governance
The capability and consistency of an organization's testing practices, governance, automation, measurement, and continuous improvement.
Test Milestone#Test Planning & Governance
A significant planned checkpoint in testing, such as environment readiness, execution start, exit review, or release recommendation.
Test Minimization#Test Design & Coverage
Reducing a test set while preserving selected coverage, risk, or fault-detection goals.
Test Monitoring#Test Planning & Governance
Ongoing collection and comparison of testing progress, results, coverage, resources, and risks against the plan.
Test Object#Core Testing Concepts
The work product being tested, which may be software, hardware, data, documentation, a model, configuration, or an integrated system.
Test Objective#Test Planning & Governance
A specific purpose for testing, such as detecting failures, measuring a quality attribute, demonstrating compliance, or reducing a product risk.
Test Oracle#Core Testing Concepts
A source or mechanism used to determine the expected result and decide whether observed behavior is acceptable.
Test Oracle Problem#Test Design & Coverage
The difficulty or cost of knowing the correct expected result for every input and system state.
Test Outcome#Core Testing Concepts
The classified conclusion from a test, such as passed, failed, blocked, skipped, or inconclusive.
Test Phase#Test Planning & Governance
A time-bounded stage of testing organized around a particular purpose, build, environment, or release milestone.
Test Plan#Test Planning & Governance
A document or maintained artifact describing test scope, objectives, approach, resources, schedule, environments, risks, and completion criteria.
Test Policy#Test Planning & Governance
A high-level organizational statement of testing principles, objectives, responsibilities, and expectations.
Test Prioritization#Test Planning & Governance
Allocating and ordering testing based on risk, value, change, dependencies, failure history, and available time.
Test Procedure#Core Testing Concepts
A sequence of actions for setting up, executing, evaluating, and cleaning up one or more tests.
Test Process Improvement#Test Planning & Governance
Systematic measurement and change intended to make testing more effective, efficient, predictable, and aligned with product risk.
Test Progress#Test Planning & Governance
The current state of planned testing expressed through execution, coverage, defects, blockers, effort, and remaining work.
Test Quarantine#Automation & Tooling
Temporary separation of an unreliable test from release decisions while its underlying cause is investigated and corrected.
Test Report#Metrics & Reporting
A structured summary of test scope, environment, execution, outcomes, coverage, defects, evidence, risks, and conclusions.
Test Report Publishing#CI/CD & Release Quality
Automated collection and presentation of test results and evidence from a pipeline or test platform.
Test Repository#Test Planning & Governance
A managed store for test cases, suites, data, results, evidence, configurations, and traceability information.
Test Resource#Test Planning & Governance
A person, tool, environment, service, device, dataset, or budget required to perform testing.
Test Result#Core Testing Concepts
Recorded information from a test execution, including outcome, observations, timing, evidence, and relevant environment details.
Test Return on Investment (ROI)#Metrics & Reporting
A comparison of testing benefits, such as avoided loss and faster feedback, with the cost of creating and operating the testing capability.
Test Risk#Test Planning & Governance
Uncertainty that could prevent testing from providing sufficient, timely, or trustworthy evidence.
Test Run#Core Testing Concepts
One execution of a selected test set against a defined build, environment, configuration, and dataset.
Test Runner#Automation & Tooling
Software that discovers, schedules, executes, and reports automated tests.
Test Scenario#Core Testing Concepts
A high-level description of a user goal, business flow, interaction, or condition to be evaluated.
Test Schedule#Test Planning & Governance
The planned sequence and timing of testing activities, dependencies, milestones, environments, and deliverables.
Test Scope#Test Planning & Governance
The boundaries of testing, defining included and excluded features, risks, quality attributes, platforms, interfaces, and data.
Test Script#Core Testing Concepts
Executable instructions, usually automated, that set up conditions, perform actions, make checks, and record results.
Test Script Maintenance#Automation & Tooling
Work required to keep automated tests aligned with product behavior, interfaces, data, dependencies, and environments.
Test Selection#Test Planning & Governance
Choosing the tests that best address a specific objective, change, risk, platform, or execution budget.
Test Setup#Automation & Tooling
Actions that establish the required data, configuration, services, sessions, and state before a test.
Test Stability#Metrics & Reporting
The consistency of test outcomes and execution behavior across equivalent runs.
Test Status Report#Test Planning & Governance
A periodic view of progress, results, coverage, defects, blockers, risks, forecast, and decisions needed.
Test Step#Core Testing Concepts
One action or check within a test procedure, with any required input and expected result.
Test Strategy#Test Planning & Governance
A durable, high-level approach explaining how testing will support quality objectives and manage product risk.
Test Suite#Core Testing Concepts
An organized collection of test cases or scripts grouped for a purpose, feature, level, risk, or execution schedule.
Test Suite Optimization#Automation & Tooling
Improving a test suite's speed, coverage, stability, diagnostic value, and maintenance cost by removing or reshaping low-value tests.
Test Teardown#Automation & Tooling
Actions that clean up data, sessions, resources, and state after a test.
Test Tenant#Test Data & Environments
A dedicated logical customer or organizational space used to test multi-tenant behavior without affecting real tenants.
Test Type#Test Planning & Governance
A group of testing activities aimed at a particular quality characteristic or objective, such as security or usability.
Test-Driven Development (TDD)#Test Design & Coverage
A development practice that cycles through writing a failing test, implementing the minimum code to pass, and refactoring safely.
Testability#Core Testing Concepts
The ease with which effective test conditions can be established, tests executed, and results observed and interpreted.
Testing Agent#Agentic & AI Testing
An autonomous or semi-autonomous software actor that performs defined testing activities using observations, tools, and feedback.
Testing vs. Debugging#Core Testing Concepts
Testing reveals failures and provides quality evidence, while debugging locates and corrects the faults responsible for those failures.
Testware#Core Testing Concepts
Artifacts created or used for testing, including plans, cases, scripts, data, environments, models, tools, results, and reports.
Text Resize Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing that text can be enlarged without loss of content, controls, readability, or functionality.
Text Spacing Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing that user-adjusted line, paragraph, letter, and word spacing does not cause loss of content or functionality.
Think Time#Performance & Scalability
A pause representing how long a simulated user waits between actions in a workload model.
Thread Pool#Performance & Scalability
A managed set of worker threads used to process tasks, which can become exhausted under load.
Throughput#Performance & Scalability
The amount of successful work completed per unit of time.
Time Series#Observability & Diagnostics
A sequence of measurements indexed by time, often grouped by a consistent set of attributes.
Time to First Byte (TTFB)#SEO & Web Quality
A web performance metric measuring the time from navigation or request start until the first response byte arrives.
Time Travel Testing#Test Data & Environments
Testing time-dependent behavior by controlling the system clock or advancing virtual time deterministically.
Time Zone Testing#Test Data & Environments
Testing storage, conversion, display, scheduling, expiry, and comparison across geographic time zones and offsets.
Timeout#Automation & Tooling
A maximum waiting or execution period after which an action, assertion, test, or run is treated as unsuccessful or interrupted.
Timing Adjustable#Accessibility Testing
An accessibility requirement that users can turn off, extend, or adjust certain time limits unless a documented exception applies.
Title Tag#SEO & Web Quality
The HTML title that identifies a page in browser tabs and commonly appears as the main search-result title.
TLS Testing#Security Testing
Testing protocol versions, cipher suites, certificates, hostname validation, downgrade resistance, and secure transport configuration.
Tokenization#Test Data & Environments
Replacing sensitive data with a non-sensitive token whose original value is held separately in a protected system.
Touch Target Testing#Mobile & Device Testing
Testing whether interactive controls are large enough, separated, visible, and operable with touch and alternative input.
Tour-Based Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Exploratory testing guided by a themed route through the product, such as features, data, configuration, or error handling.
Toxicity Testing#Agentic & AI Testing
Evaluation of whether an AI system generates abusive, hateful, harassing, or otherwise harmful content under relevant conditions.
Trace#Observability & Diagnostics
A representation of an end-to-end operation composed of related spans across components or services.
Trace Context#Observability & Diagnostics
Identifiers and metadata that let spans from different components be connected into one distributed trace.
Trace ID#Observability & Diagnostics
An identifier shared by all spans belonging to one distributed trace.
Trace Recording#Automation & Tooling
Automated capture of actions, timing, application state, network activity, console output, and other diagnostic events during a test.
Trace Sampling#Observability & Diagnostics
Selecting which traces to record or retain in order to control volume while preserving diagnostic value.
Traceability#Test Planning & Governance
The ability to follow relationships among requirements, risks, code, tests, results, defects, and releases.
Trajectory Evaluation#Agentic & AI Testing
Assessment of both the final result and the sequence of actions an agent took to reach it.
Transactions per Second (TPS)#Performance & Scalability
A throughput measure counting completed business or technical transactions each second.
Transcript Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing that an accurate, complete, and usable text alternative is available for relevant audio or audiovisual content.
Transformation Rule Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing that each data transformation implements its mapping, calculation, cleansing, filtering, and exception rules correctly.
Trivial Defect#Defect Management
A cosmetic or very low-impact defect that does not meaningfully impede use or operation.

U20 terms

UI Test Automation#Automation & Tooling
Automated interaction with user-interface controls and states to verify visible behavior and user workflows.
Understandable#Accessibility Testing
The WCAG principle that information and interface operation must be clear, predictable, and comprehensible.
Unhappy Path#Core Testing Concepts
A flow involving invalid input, missing prerequisites, rejected actions, failures, or recovery instead of straightforward success.
Unicode Testing#Data & Database Testing
Testing storage, input, display, search, comparison, normalization, and transfer of characters from relevant writing systems and symbols.
Unique Defect Rate#Metrics & Reporting
The proportion of reported findings that remain distinct confirmed defects after validation and deduplication.
Unit Testing#Test Types & Levels
Component-level testing of a small unit of code, usually in isolation and commonly performed by developers.
Unscripted Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that is not constrained by detailed prewritten steps and adapts as the tester learns.
Upgrade Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing that verifies behavior, data, compatibility, rollback, and user impact when moving to a newer product version.
Uptime#Reliability & Resilience
The period or proportion of time during which a service provides an acceptable result.
URL Normalization#SEO & Web Quality
Consistent transformation of equivalent URL forms so routing, caching, analytics, canonicalization, and indexing behave predictably.
Usability#Quality Attributes & UX
The degree to which intended users can achieve goals effectively, efficiently, safely, and satisfactorily in a specified context.
Usability Testing#Test Types & Levels
Evaluation with representative users or expert methods to identify obstacles in learning, navigation, comprehension, efficiency, and satisfaction.
Use Case Testing#Test Design & Coverage
A black-box technique that derives end-to-end tests from interactions between actors and a system to achieve goals.
USE Method#Observability & Diagnostics
A resource-monitoring approach focused on utilization, saturation, and errors.
User Acceptance Testing (UAT)#Test Types & Levels
Acceptance testing performed by intended users or business representatives to confirm that the system supports real operational needs.
User Error Protection#Quality Attributes & UX
The degree to which a product prevents likely mistakes or limits their negative consequences.
User Experience (UX)#Quality Attributes & UX
A person's perceptions, emotions, and responses before, during, and after using a product or service.
User Impact#Defect Management
The number and types of users affected by a defect and the degree to which their goals, safety, trust, or access are harmed.
User Journey#Quality Attributes & UX
The sequence of interactions and touchpoints through which a user pursues a goal across a product or service.

V12 terms

Validation#Core Testing Concepts
Evaluation of whether the completed or evolving product fulfills intended use and stakeholder needs in its real context.
Verification#Core Testing Concepts
Evaluation of whether a work product conforms to specified requirements, design, rules, or other defined criteria.
Verifier Agent#Agentic & AI Testing
A specialized agent that independently checks whether evidence, outcomes, and reported findings satisfy defined criteria.
Video Recording#Automation & Tooling
Capture of the visible test session as video to support diagnosis, review, and defect evidence.
Virtual Private Accessibility Template (VPAT)#Accessibility Testing
A standardized template vendors use to document how a product supports accessibility criteria.
Virtual User#Performance & Scalability
A software-simulated user that follows a defined behavior and timing model during performance testing.
Visible Focus#Accessibility Testing
A clear visual indication of which interactive element currently has keyboard focus.
Visual Baseline#Web & Browser Testing
An approved reference image or rendered state used to evaluate later visual changes.
Visual Regression Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing that compares current rendered interfaces with approved baselines to detect unintended visual changes.
Visual Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing rendered appearance for unintended changes, clipping, overlap, styling, content, and responsive layout defects.
Voice Control Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing whether controls have discoverable spoken names and can be operated accurately through speech input.
Volume Testing#Test Types & Levels
Testing system behavior with large amounts of data, records, files, messages, or storage consumption.

W24 terms

Wait Strategy#Automation & Tooling
A consistent approach for synchronizing automation with application state while avoiding brittle fixed delays.
Walkthrough#Test Design & Coverage
A review led by the author, who guides participants through a work product to build understanding and find issues.
Warm Start#Performance & Scalability
Startup when some process, container, code, cache, or connection state is already initialized and reusable.
WCAG 2.2#Accessibility Testing
The W3C recommendation defining testable success criteria for making web content more accessible to people with disabilities.
WCAG Conformance Level A#Accessibility Testing
The foundational WCAG conformance level containing essential accessibility requirements.
WCAG Conformance Level AA#Accessibility Testing
The commonly targeted WCAG level that includes all Level A and Level AA success criteria.
WCAG Conformance Level AAA#Accessibility Testing
The highest WCAG conformance level, including all Level A, AA, and AAA success criteria, though it may not suit every page.
WCAG Success Criterion#Accessibility Testing
A testable, technology-neutral requirement used to assess conformance to a version and level of WCAG.
Web Application Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing a browser-based application across functionality, interfaces, security, accessibility, performance, compatibility, and usability.
Web Form Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing fields, labels, defaults, validation, submission, errors, accessibility, autofill, security, and data persistence in web forms.
Web Manifest Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing a web app manifest for valid metadata, icons, display mode, start URL, scope, and install behavior.
WebDriver#Automation & Tooling
A standards-based remote-control interface for automating and inspecting web browsers.
WebDriver BiDi#Automation & Tooling
A bidirectional browser automation protocol that supports event-driven communication between automation clients and browsers.
Webhook Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing outbound event callbacks for signatures, retries, ordering, duplication, payload contracts, errors, and idempotent handling.
Website Bug Detection#Web & Browser Testing
Discovery of functional, visual, accessibility, performance, security, content, or integration defects on a website.
Website Monitoring#Observability & Diagnostics
Repeated automated checking of website availability, transactions, content, performance, certificates, and errors over time.
Website Quality Assurance#Web & Browser Testing
The practices used to prevent, detect, and manage website defects across design, development, release, and operation.
Website Regression Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Testing a website after changes to detect unintended impact on existing pages, flows, integrations, or presentation.
Website Testing#Web & Browser Testing
Systematic evaluation of a website's functionality, usability, compatibility, accessibility, performance, security, SEO, and reliability.
WebSocket Testing#API & Service Testing
Testing connection setup, authentication, messages, ordering, reconnection, errors, timeouts, limits, and concurrent clients.
White-Box Testing#Test Design & Coverage
Testing based on knowledge of internal code, logic, data flow, architecture, or implementation structure.
Whole-Team Approach#Test Planning & Governance
An agile quality practice in which everyone contributes to prevention, testing, feedback, and shared responsibility for product quality.
Won't Fix#Defect Management
A defect disposition indicating that the team has decided not to implement a correction, usually with documented rationale and risk ownership.
Workload Model#Performance & Scalability
A quantitative description of users, operations, data, arrival patterns, concurrency, timing, and traffic mix used in performance testing.

X2 terms

XML Sitemap#SEO & Web Quality
A machine-readable list of site URLs and optional metadata intended to help search engines discover canonical content.
XPath#Automation & Tooling
A query language used by browser automation to locate nodes through paths, attributes, text, and relationships in XML or HTML documents.

Z1 term

Zoom Testing#Accessibility Testing
Testing content and controls at increased browser or platform zoom for reflow, clipping, overlap, and operability.

What this glossary covers

This is a curated reference of 1,075 English testing terms spanning 21 categories: test planning, design and coverage techniques, test types and levels, automation and tooling, API, web, mobile, data, security, accessibility, performance, reliability, observability, defect management, metrics, and 111 terms specific to agentic and AI testing. Definitions are original editorial syntheses informed by ISTQB, ISO/IEC 25010, W3C, OWASP, NIST, OpenTelemetry, and other primary sources listed at the bottom of this page — they are not copied normative text.

Every term has a stable anchor link. Deep-link any definition as byebugs.ai/glossary#term-slug — for example #agentic-testing.

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Frequently asked questions

What is agentic testing?

Agentic testing is goal-directed software testing in which AI agents plan, act, observe, adapt, and report findings across multi-step workflows. Instead of replaying a fixed script, the agent is given an objective and chooses its own navigation, data, and checks based on what it observes, then collects evidence for every finding it reports.

How is agentic testing different from traditional test automation?

Traditional test automation is open-loop: the actions are fixed in advance and do not adapt to what happens during execution. Agentic testing is closed-loop: each observation feeds back into the next decision, so the agent can explore unscripted paths, recover from unexpected states, and discover defects that were never written into a test case.

What is the difference between an error, a fault, a defect, and a failure?

An error is the human action or decision that produces an incorrect result. A fault is the resulting incorrect code, data, or configuration. A defect is the flaw in the work product that may cause unacceptable behavior. A failure is the observable event in which the system does not perform a required function within specified limits.

What is the difference between verification and validation?

Verification asks whether a work product conforms to its specified requirements, design, rules, or other defined criteria — building the thing right. Validation asks whether the completed or evolving product fulfills its intended use and stakeholder needs in the real context — building the right thing.

What makes a bug report evidence-grounded?

An evidence-grounded finding is one whose claims are directly supported by reproducible steps, captured state, logs, screenshots, traces, or other artifacts. The evidence chain connects observed behavior through captured artifacts to the reported conclusion, so a reviewer can confirm the defect without re-running the investigation.

How is an AI test agent evaluated?

Agent evaluation measures task success, safety, reliability, efficiency, and behavior under defined conditions. Common approaches include end-state evaluation (scoring the final system state), trajectory evaluation (scoring the sequence of actions taken), step-level evaluation of individual tool calls, and metrics such as task success rate, pass@k, bug detection precision, and reproducibility rate.

Sources & editorial notes

Scope: 1,075 English terms that directly support test planning, execution, automated bug discovery, diagnosis, reporting, and triage. Excluded: named attacks, exploits, vulnerability patterns, offensive-security concepts, and generic technology terms with no direct testing or bug-workflow purpose. Definitions are original, concise editorial syntheses informed by the references below; they are not copied normative definitions.

  • ISTQBCore software-testing terminology and established QA vocabulary
  • ISO/IEC 25010:2023Product-quality model and quality characteristics
  • OWASPWeb Security Testing Guide methodology and web-application security test areas
  • W3C WAIWCAG 2.2 principles, success criteria, glossary, and conformance model
  • W3C WebDriverBrowser automation interface and the bidirectional WebDriver protocol
  • OpenAPI InitiativeOpenAPI Specification for HTTP API descriptions and contracts
  • NISTAI test, evaluation, validation, and verification guidance, and evaluation probes for agentic AI
  • Google web.devWeb Vitals and Core Web Vitals terminology
  • Google SREService-level objectives, indicators, and error budgets
  • OpenTelemetryObservability, traces, metrics, logs, and telemetry glossary
  • MDN Web DocsCross-browser and web testing concepts
  • PlaywrightRetries, trace-based diagnosis, browser automation, and visual comparisons
  • Google Cloud DORASoftware-delivery performance metrics

Last reviewed July 2026.