Introduction to Quality Assurance

Define and distinguish bugs and defects, and explain how gaps between specs and the product create defects. Use examples like invalid field inputs and missing login options to illustrate.

Explore how severity and priority distinguish bugs and defects, showing how high severity and high priority halt systems, while low severity or priority changes influence fix timing and management.

Learn how quality assurance drives defect prevention from design through production, and why fixing bugs early lowers costs while production defects raise risk and expense.

Understand how poor quality inflates costs and harms reputation, trust, and investors' confidence, and learn to drive quality early to reduce defects and disruption.

Track a bug from identification to logging, triage, and reproduction, then decide if it's duplicate or out of scope, prioritize in the backlog, and fix with retesting.

Track bugs, defects, and unbuilt features across the software lifecycle using agile-friendly tools like Jira or spreadsheets, ensuring consistent bug tracking for sprint planning and product manager decisions.

Learn how quality control tests evaluate systems against requirements, identify gaps and bugs, and follow a sequence of actions aligned with both waterfall and agile practices.

Learn a standard set of functional tests, from unit and integration tests through system, regression, smoke, and user acceptance testing.

Perform unit testing earliest and most frequently as developers verify code. Proceed with integration, system, and user acceptance tests, then regression and smoke tests for production readiness.

Explore the four main testing environments—development, testing, staging, and production—and how code moves between them with matching data and testing practices.

Explore non-functional testing concepts alongside functional testing, including load, stress, performance, installation, and security tests, across development to production environments.

The lecture contrasts positive and negative testing, guiding testers to craft scenarios for normal use and edge cases, including a zip code field, missing fields, unauthorized access, and expired credentials.

Define a standard test case structure with a header, scenario, steps, expected results, and outcomes, using templates for unit tests to document results and notes.

Review a generic test case template, detailing header information such as date, tester, and code version, plus the description, steps, and expected outcomes, then explain pass or fail reporting.

Explore how to create unit test scenarios for the login screen, focusing on testing a single function or component in development, using templates, and avoiding upstream or downstream checks.

Explore unit test cases for the login screen, including valid login, invalid username or password, and blank fields, with password masking and expected navigation to the home page.

Practice building thorough unit tests for the create invoice screen, detailing positive and negative scenarios, required-field validations, and add/delete row behaviors, and cancel flows to prevent unintended saves.

Explore a simple system flow diagram from login to adding or editing customers and invoices, with actions like email, pdf, history, and logout used in integration tests.

Explain integration testing of the login screen, including one step up and one step down, with social logins and forgot password flows, verified by the QA team in testing environment.

Learn integration testing for the invoice page using the system flow to build test scripts. Validate create, edit, save and close, view pdf, and save and email scenarios.

Test the end-to-end system flow from login to invoice creation and emailing, ensuring unit, integration, and functional tests validate each step in the testing environment.

Build regression testing by inventorying system test scripts, assess changes on core functions, edit affected scripts, and re-execute edited and core tests in the testing environment to prevent production issues.

Master user acceptance testing as the final, staging-focused validation before production, coordinating hundreds of users across departments with production-like data and complex time-based scenarios.

Explore black box and white box testing in quality assurance, comparing unseen inner workings to observable inputs and outputs, with examples from pacemakers, proprietary algorithms, and artificial intelligence decisions.

Automated testing tools simplify creating and maintaining test scripts and inventory for large, long-lived projects. Discover when load, regression, integration, and system testing benefit from automation and ongoing script maintenance.

Compare development, testing, and user acceptance environments to show how test data is created, scrubbed, and migrated. Assess benefits, drawbacks, and how extraction, transformation, and loading handle data.

Reinforce a functional full-stack view of the SDLC and the value of quality assurance for developers, emphasizing writing high quality code to withstand tester scrutiny and save money.