Gojko Adzic describes defining tests with the following statement: “It’s not important what you call it, but what it does.” This is a great way to approach defining tests. The truth is that there are many different definitions out there, and it’s often difficult to isolate a single meaning from the large variety of perspectives and roles that exist within the development community. In this post, we’ll go over the differences between unit, integration, and functional testing. A programmer could spend a lot of time improving test automation (it’s a huge field), but today we’ll try and cover these three.…

There are a lot of terms used to talk about testing, but it’s not always clear what they actually mean and what the differences are between them. One of the most common areas of confusion, for both non-technical and technical people, arise from distinguishing the differences between the following terms: error, fault, bug, defect, and failure. So, what’s correct? And more importantly, does it really matter if you’re 100% absolutely correct when using this terminology? First, let’s cover the definitions: Error: A discrepancy found during development, which creates a deviation from the result (i.e. an unexpected result is produced rather…