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I tend to use the term functional test in different ways than Ruby on Rails developers. I worry that because test definitions for things like functional tests, regression tests, mocks, stubs and doubles are a little subjective that it might be a good idea to have a Community wiki page with these definitions ... assuming that we all can agree on them ourselves.

I think Mezaros' glossary from XUnitPatterns is a good starting point.

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Good question. I think that that is already covered by the ISTQB testing glossary so no.

But ... If we don't have one, will we get "What is black box testing", What is White Box testing", "What is a test plan" questions ?

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  • My feelings exactly!
    – terryp
    Commented May 4, 2011 at 12:11
  • I think if we get that kind of question, we close it. Having a glossary won't help there, because if someone is asking that kind of question they probably won't bother looking at one.
    – testerab
    Commented May 4, 2011 at 18:20
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    I personally feel that if someone posts a question that starts with "what is ..." and hasn't first at least typed it into google and looked at the first result, they're really not fulfilling their end of the 'stack exchange contract' so to speak. The philosophy is that those answering the question will be experts in the field. That degree of professionalism demands at least the effort to solve the problem on their own.
    – corsiKa Mod
    Commented May 4, 2011 at 22:13
  • giggle and in fact, you don't have to click into the first result. It's there in google's preview of the site (which as you probably guessed was Wikipedia.) This is not an uncommon occurance.
    – corsiKa Mod
    Commented May 4, 2011 at 22:15
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This is a question and answer site, not a glossary site. The design of the site does not lend itself well to having a glossary. That said, tag wikis are a good place for definitions to go.

To handle questions that come in asking "what is {insert term here}" "General Reference" as a closure reason has been implemented on a few of our siblings (namely english.stackexchange and scifi.stackexchange), which would be the best bet. It's documented over on meta.stackoverflow.com. If we feel strongly enough then we should probably ask to have that feature activated over here sooner rather than later.

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  • and if they need to know what is black box testing they need to actaully look at the top links on a search engine...just saying. :)
    – Dan Snell
    Commented May 5, 2011 at 5:22

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