Quality Engineering Definitions

Common Quality Engineering Terms

Software Quality Engineering (SQE) is a critical discipline that ensures the reliability, functionality, and performance of software applications. Whether you’re a seasoned SQE professional or new to the field, understanding key terms is essential. Here’s a comprehensive guide to some common terms in Software Quality Engineering.

Quality engineering definitions supplied by ISTQB.

Quality Assurance – Activities focused on providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled.

Quality Control – A set of activities designed to evaluate the quality of a component or system.

Quality Management – Coordinated activities to direct and control an organization with regard to quality that include establishing a quality policy and quality objectives, quality planning, quality control, quality assurance, and quality improvement.

Unit Testing (Component Testing) – A test level that focuses on individual hardware or software components.

System Integration Testing – A test level that focuses on interactions between systems.

User Acceptance Testing – A type of acceptance testing performed to determine if intended users accept the system.

Functional Testing – Testing performed to evaluate if a component or system satisfies functional requirements.

Non-Functional Testing – Testing performed to evaluate that a component or system complies with non-functional requirements.

Automated Testing – A realization/implementation of a test automation architecture, i.e., a combination of components implementing a specific test automation assignment. The components may include commercial off-the-shelf test tools, test automation frameworks, as well as test hardware.

Production Validation Testing – Testing performed to evaluate system in live production environment.

Test data management – is the process of planning, designing, storing, and managing the creation of test data for software quality-testing processes and methodologies.

Data Protection – The practice of securing right level of access, masking sensitive data, and encryption of that data in motion and at rest.

Data Privacy – The protection of personally identifiable information or otherwise sensitive information from undesired disclosure.

Many related software quality definitions have been provided by ISTQB Glossary.

How Can Apply QA Help

Apply QA is an industry leader in quality engineering best practices, education, career mentoring, job board, and consulting.

Best Practices

Apply QA offers free blog posts on different quality engineering and software testing topics. You can view the blog here.

Educational Material

The owner of Apply QA has written many articles and books on Quality Assurance, Quality Engineering, and Software Testing over the years. Along with heavy focus on security, advanced technology testing such as cloud and AI. These books can be found here.

Career Mentoring

Apply QA recognizes that it helps to have a quality mentor to help elevate your quality engineering and software testing career. Mentoring services can be found here.

Job Board

Once you have acquired the skills to be a solid quality engineer or software tester, we have partnered with a job aggregator to pull together recent, relevant quality or software testing jobs. The job board can be found here.

Also, if you are a hiring manager looking for a “quality” testing candidate. We do offer sponsor listings on top, please contact us for more information on our low-cost pricing.