Continuous Testing — Some Semantics
If you’re doing any form of Continuous Testing (or heck, even just automating your tests), you’ve probably already run into the Semantics Gap , where what you mean by XXX isn’t what others mean by it. This can be quite the killer, in ways both subtle and gross. I recall a post-mortem in the past that boiled down to the QA and Release teams having different assumptions about what “ The Smoke-tests passed ” meant. The resulting chaos — both between the teams, and for the customer — was epic , and something that still makes me shudder reflexively when I look back at it . And that, my friends, is just about when I put together the following terminology. Mind you, far be it for me to tell you to adopt this terminology. Heck, you may very well vehemently disagree with it — and that’s ok. The thing is, whatever terminology you use needs to be agreed upon by everybody! (And, you’ve probably got all the same stuff below, just broken ...