QA Fundamentals

The core concepts everything else is built on. If this is your first time here, this is the recommended order:

1. What is QA? — what quality assurance really means, and the difference between QA, QC, and testing.
2. Types of testing — functional, non-functional, black/white box, regression, smoke…
3. The testing pyramid — how to distribute effort across unit, integration, and E2E tests.
4. Test case design — techniques for choosing what to test: equivalence partitioning, boundary values, decision tables.
5. Bug reporting — how to write a bug a developer can reproduce and fix on the first try.
6. Exploratory testing — learning, designing and executing at once: charter-based sessions and heuristics to find the unexpected.
7. The evolving QA role — what quality is, why manual testing doesn't scale, and where the role is headed.