Types of testing

Get more understanding on some terminology which I was confused

• Differences between Alpha Testing, Beta Testing, UAT user acceptance testing

Alpha Testing: At the end of development, in House testing, Visual or simulation user environment, Done by QA or other team members

Beta Testing: Last step before releasing, Done by wildly end users, in user's environment

UAT user acceptance testing: Done by client or user, Verify if the system meets customer requirement. Alpha testing and Beta testing are both user acceptance testing.

In Agile development, UAT can be done in any phase.

• Sanity testing vs Smoke testing

diagram from guru99

Sanity Testing: 

testing new functionalities or minor changes, new fixes, relevant areas which may be affected by the changes
a subset of regression testing that focuses on one or a few areas of functionality
narrow and deep
unscripted, rough set of test cases
like specialized health check up

Smoke Testing:

first thing to be done on a new build, decide if the build will be accepted or rejected for deep testing
test the most critical basic functionality
wide and shallow testing
scripted either written or automated
a subset of acceptance testing
like General Health Check Up

holds high regards in SCRUM and Agile
individual QA's perform this testing for the stories that they own, the first 2-3 criteria of each user story 
automation



As per the needs of testing, you may have to execute both Sanity and Smoke Tests in the software build. In such cases, you will first execute Smoke tests and then go ahead with Sanity Testing. In industry, test cases for Sanity Testing are commonly combined with that for smoke tests, to speed up test execution. Hence, it's a common that the terms are often confused and used interchangeably.

• ad hoc testing

random testing. Error Guessing. Error guessing can be done by the people having enough experience on the system to "guess" the most likely source of errors.

• usability testing

who: a small set of target end-users

what: focuses on the user's ease to use the application, if user friendly

when: during the initial design phase of SDLC

• exploratory test

who: testers

what: test design and test execution at the same time, testing as "thinking" activity

when: test cases are not created, with or without requirement

• unit test

unit test:
white box testing
usually done in development
to isolate a section of code and verify its correctness

tools: Junit, Nunit