Glossary

The vocabulary every other glossary here assumes you already know — test case, defect, coverage, verification vs. validation.

Unit, integration, regression, smoke, exploratory, black box — the different lenses testing gets done through.

Structured methods for deciding what to test — boundary value analysis, decision tables, pairwise testing, TDD, BDD.

Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Appium, and the concepts that cut across all of them — locators, waits, flaky tests, POM.

REST, GraphQL, contract testing, mocking, schema validation — testing the layer below the UI.

Load, stress, spike, soak testing, and the metrics that describe how a system behaves under pressure.

Penetration testing, OWASP Top 10, SAST/DAST, and the vocabulary of finding vulnerabilities before attackers do.

Native, hybrid, and responsive app testing — device farms, emulators, gestures, and mobile-specific edge cases.

Where testing meets the pipeline — shift-left, quality gates, canary releases, chaos engineering.

How testing actually gets run day to day — agile testing, defect lifecycle, bug triage, sprint testing.

How testing gets measured — defect density, MTTD/MTTR, escaped defects, automation ROI.

WCAG, ARIA, screen readers, keyboard navigation — testing that a product actually works for everyone.

The vocabulary a classic QA glossary doesn't have yet — agentic testing, LLM evaluation, hallucination testing, prompt injection.

SDET, QA Architect, Automation Engineer — what these titles actually mean and how they differ.

Jira, TestRail, BrowserStack, Postman, Jenkins — the real-world software QA teams run on.