🐞 QA Stands For Quality p.11 - Levels Of Testing
What It Is, What Are The Specifics For Software And Game Development And What Practically Do You Need To Know
Hey friends 👋
Welcome to the next issue of this QA series, where I share the information that helped me become a QA and that I picked up over the years to climb from a Trainee QA to managing an entire department, and that I used to teach as a course on how to become a QA from scratch.
Now that we are done talking about general models of development, let’s talk about actual work. And to start things off, let’s talk about how deep your testing goes, how wide and how close to the real user experience.
Alright, let’s get into it.
🪜 What Are The Different Levels Of Testing
If you imagine an assembly line and how everything is manufactured these days, you know that to, say, build a car, you don’t start putting it all together all at once. You start by creating a part of a car, a tire, for example. To make a tire, you need several components. You make those individual components, assemble them, and then repeat the same process until you put together an entire car. The same principle applies to Testing Levels.
Before we start testing the entire system, we need to check that all individual components are up to requirements (that the rubber on the tire is up to standard, that the wheel is actually a square 😅 and so on), then we need to make sure that those components are working together (tire actually connects to wheel rim, steering wheel correctly controls the direction of the tires etc.) and only then you proceed to test the system as a whole.
In software testing, those organisational groups look like this:
Unit Testing – Individual functions, methods, or classes.
Integration Testing – Interactions between those individual functions or groups of functions.
System Testing – The complete application as a whole.
Acceptance Testing – The final experience, whether it matches user expectations and business goals
