
QA Must Know Terminology: Essential Terms Every QA Should Know

Quality Assurance (QA) plays a vital role in the software development lifecycle. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned QA professional, understanding the core QA terminology is crucial for effective communication, testing, and collaboration. In this article, I’ll break down the must-know QA terms in a short and technical format to help you stay updated.
Core QA Terms
These are the foundational terms every QA engineer must understand:
- Test Case: A defined set of actions and expected results to verify a particular feature
- Test Plan: A document outlining the testing scope, objectives, strategy, and schedule
- Test Scenario: A high-level concept of what to test based on user interactions
- Test Suite: A collection of related test cases grouped for execution
- Test Data: Input data used to execute test cases
- Test Environment: The hardware and software setup where testing is performed
Types of Software Testing
Different testing types target different quality attributes:
- Smoke Testing: Initial testing to ensure critical functionalities work
- Sanity Testing: Verifying minor changes or bug fixes
- Regression Testing: Ensures new updates don’t break existing features
- Functional Testing: Validates the application against functional requirements
- Non-functional Testing: Tests aspects like performance, scalability, and security
- UAT (User Acceptance Testing): Final testing phase by end-users before release
- Compatibility Testing: Checks app behavior across browsers, OS, and devices
Defect Management Terminology
Understanding how bugs are reported and tracked is essential:
- Bug/Defect: An error or flaw causing incorrect output or behavior
- Severity: Indicates the impact level of the defect on the system
- Priority: Reflects how urgently a defect needs to be fixed
- Defect Lifecycle: Stages of a bug from discovery to closure
- Reproducibility: Ability to replicate the defect consistently
Tools and Automation
Automation and tools are core to modern QA practices:
- Selenium: Popular open-source tool for browser automation
- Playwright: Modern end-to-end testing framework for web apps, supporting multiple browsers
- Postman: Tool for API request testing and automation
- JIRA: Widely used for issue tracking and test management
- CI/CD: Continuous Integration and Deployment pipelines that automate testing
- TestNG / JUnit: Frameworks for running and managing automated tests in Java
QA Metrics and Documentation
These terms help assess and track testing quality:
- Test Coverage: The percentage of code or requirements tested
- Traceability Matrix: Maps requirements to test cases to ensure coverage
- Bug Leakage: Defects found in production after release
- Bug Release: Known defects intentionally released due to low risk
- Exploratory Testing: Informal testing focused on learning and discovering issues on the fly
Understanding QA terminology is essential for every quality professional. Whether you're performing manual testing, building automation scripts, or handling defect management, these terms are the foundation of your day-to-day work. Keep this list handy and refer back to it regularly to stay sharp and confident in your QA career.