Terminology that a Tester should be aware of!!

Error – Fault— Failure        

Testers are those who improves the quality of the product and they see that most of the bugs are solved, before the product is shipped.

The common terms that the IT people use when they find the defect in the code.  Error, Fault, and failure.Though the terms are synonyms, they differ in their functionality when it come in terms of IT sector.

Let us take an example.

Temperature=temperature + 10;

If( Temprature>100) printf(“Critical Temp”);

Else printf(“Normal temp”);

In the above example, 

i) This code is basically written by developers, the fault that is been found is spelling of Temperature.

And the condition shows “critical temp” only when temprature>100( as per code) and not Temperature>100. So, such type of faults which occur at the initial stages of coding are called as                               “ERROR”.

ii) Now,   the second phase is testing .  When the simulation is done on the above program, the simulation goes fine but the actual error isn’t noticed. Hence here the defect  is called as “FAULT”.

iii) And then, if the code is been shipped and it’s under execution, the system runs fine unless the condition is not met. If the temperature really exceeds value 100, then a message should be shown as “critical temp”. But in this case due to that defect, the error message is not shown. Hence the system gets failed.

This defect which is found at the time of execution is called as “FAILURE”.

Being a software Test engineers, one has to make sure that the “terminology” has to be followed, to become a good test Engineer.

Post by :- Pardha Saradhi Boddupalli

Published by :- Pardha Saradhi