Working Party: ISTQB Glossary of testing and related terms
Mission
The ISTQB Glossary working party aims at delivering a glossary of testing and related terms that shall be used as a reference / source document for syllabi at Foundation, Advanced and in the expert level.
Each local glossary Working party, if one exists, is responsible for their own local glossary (the translation of the international glossary to their own language). This is not part of the assignment of the ISTQB WP ‘Glossary’.
Each testing board of ISTQB is able to publish or reference the released Glossary as a whole or in part on their own website. The released Glossary is for free published on the ISTQB-website in a download version.
Members
The following person (WP Chair) is responsible for preparing and delivering the expected WP results:
Erik van Veenendaal, eve"at"improveqs.nl, phone 040-2021803, fax 040-2021450,
Improve Quality Services BV, The Netherlands
Review Board
The following persons are the review working party members. They will be informed by the WP chair about material ready for review:
- Meile Posthuma (NL/Be), meile.posthuma"at"mail.ing.nl
- Horst Pohlmann (Ger) HorstPohlmann"at"t-online.de
- Vipul (India) vipul"at"whatistesting.com
- Juha Itkonen (Fi) juha.itkonen"at"tkk.fi
- Avi Ofer (Isr.) avi.ofer"at"intel.com (Vice chair)
- Lucjan Stapp (Pol) l.stapp"at"sjsi.org
- Bernard Homes (Fr.) bhomes"at"tesscogroup.com
- Enst Düring (No) Ernst.Duering"at"oslobors.no
- Reto Mueller (Swi) rm"at"synspace.com
- David Fuller (Aus) df2783"at"pnc.com.au
- Paul Jorgensen (US) jorgensp"at"gvsu.edu
- Ian Howle (UK) ian.howles"at"eds.com
- Marco Sogliani (Ita) marcosogliani"at"yahoo.it
- Anders Pettersson (Swe) l.anders.e.pettersson"at"gmail.com
- Gustavo Marquez Sosa (Spa) grmarquez_sosa"at"computer.org
If any board is interested to become a review working party member please send your application for membership via email to the Working Party chair.
Status
The ISTQB glossary (1.0) has been been formally released by the ISTQB board and is freely available since December 2004. At BSI a working party has been set up to deal with this issue and is expected to start working as of may 2005. (No progress has been made in this area.)
In the latest period some editorial minors were corrected and a few definitions added. A voting was held to release this new version of the ISTQB Glossary. Based on the outcome, the working party has released version 1.2 on June, 4th 2006.
From the market many positive comments have been received and the glossary is now widely accepted.
Ten new emails have been received, each containing several change request. In the upcoming period these will be investigated.
Version 2.0 is possibly the next target, this will be issued as a major release both dealing with all outstanding CR’s and to bring the glossary in line with the advanced level syllabus.
08-07-2007
In the recent period version 1.3 of the glossary has been submitted for approval after a formal voting process by email. The main objective of V1.3 was allignment with the new Foundation syllabus.
Currently work has been done to establish a new version of the glossary (2.0) to provide allignment with the AL syllabus. A list of terms has been established that needs to be added, also the newly submitted CR’s have been added to the list. The working party will now start to work on this list and expects to be able to submit a new version for release August 2007.
01-10-2007
A new version of the glossary is currently in progress. This version (2.0) mainly addresses the allignment with the AL syllabus. A total of 79 CR’s were submitted and voted upon for acceptance by the working party members. 60 CR’s were accepted to be implemented in version 2.0 of the glossary. All CR’s have by now been implemented in the new glossary version and the glossary is currently under a final formal review by the working party.
It is expected that version 2.0 can be sent out for a email voting / review to all ISTQB boards by mid october and hopefully subsequently released early november.
The IP forms and working party agreements have been sent to all WP members. Those members who have returned their signed forms have been indicated with a √. Currently only 5 out of 15 members have returned their form.
29-02-2008
The new version (version 2.0) has been developed and released in november, 2007. This version provides an alligment of the glossary with the AL syllabus. The number of new and changed terms is that large that it has been decided to go version 2.0 (and not 1.4). Version 2.0 is not expected to have any influence on the FL syllabus.
In the next time frame all outstanding CR’s will be analysed and voted upon in order to have a complete and up-to-date overview of the CR’s. A new version is not expected to be released in 2008, unless this is needed for the expert level syllabus. Stability to all stakeholers is of major importance after having had two releases in 2007.
The IP forms and working party agreements have been sent to all WP members. Those members who have returned their signed forms have been indicated with a √. Currently 10 out of 15 members have returned their form.
08-06-2008
Work has started to analyse the current set of outstaning CR’s. No definite plans has been made for a new version. Most likely a new version will be needed soon after the release of the first expert level module.
All members have signed the NDA and IP forms.
Avi Ofer has offered to become the vice-chair of this working party. To be confirmed by a voting at the next ISTQB meeting in Sofia.
24-09-2008
The list of submitted CR’s has been compiled into an excel sheet for future analysis and voting by the working party. Voting will be done to accept the CR’s and in this way clear the CR-base. The implementation of the accepted CT’s is not yet scehduled. In total 243 CR’s have been submitted (not including spelling mistakes etc.) and will be analysed and voted upon over the next period.
No definite plans has been made for a new version. Most likely a new version will be needed soon after the release of the first expert level module.
03-03-2009
The outstanding 243 CR’s have voted upon by various members. We are currently analyzing the votes to decide which one to accept.
Most likely a new version will be needed soon after the release of the first expert level modules. Since both the expert level Test Manager and Improving the Testing Process are scheduled for a beta release in june, a new version of the glossary is expected for October 2009.
Work plan:
Next milestones
Complete and Up-to-date overview of CR’s (expected June 2009)
Next release ISTQB Glossary (3.0) October 2009
Links
The current ISTQB Glossary of Testing Terms is available for download.

