This glossary defines the terms you use when using the QA enterprise tools and provides links to articles for more information. See also the Feature Glossary for terms your team members encounter while learning in the platform.

A * B * C * D * E * F * G * H * I * J * K * L * M * N * O * P * Q * R * S * T * U * V * W * X * Y * Z

A

Analytics Screen

The Analytics screen shows how much time members, teams, and your whole company have spent on learning activities.

API

The QA API is a programming interface that you can use to integrate QA features with your internal business systems. For example, you might use the QA API to create a custom dashboard that's available from your company intranet.

Assessments

An assessment is a test to understand the team's baseline knowledge on a topic. When you assign an assessment, you select one or more exams and/or lab challenges for the team or member to complete. You normally assign assessments when you start a new team, but you can also use assessments on an ongoing basis. The assignment of an assessment to a team is called "an assessment cycle."

C

Career Paths

A career path is a representation of how a team member progresses through their career at your company. Career paths are one of the Skills Readiness Solution tools.

Content Engine

Content Engine is a tool in QA where you can create custom learning content for your team members. You can use this feature to clone and customize labs that mirror your production environment, upload your new employee training materials so that your employees have a one-stop shop for all training, and deploy internal certification programs..

 

D

Dashboard

The dashboard is the first screen you see when you log in to your account. This is the starting point for training in QA.

E

Enterprise Bridge Function

Firewall restrictions, filtered networks, or policies against installing software can block some QA enterprise users from accessing hands-on labs. Creating firewall rules to allow access to the hands-on labs is the best solution to firewall issues, but if you cannot update your firewall for some reason, or if some other corporate issue cannot be resolved, the bridge function can help.

Bridge mode offers a secure way to access hands-on labs. By logging in to virtual machine "bridge" first, users can then log in to the hands-on labs tools.

Exams

An exam is a tool to check your knowledge of a topic. Exams are an effective way to assess your skills in a particular focus area. Exams can help you understand critical areas to invest in training.

H

Hands-on Labs

Labs are QA's interactive learning tool. While tutorials may tell you or show you information, labs offer you practical, hands-on experience. Our labs integrate with live cloud environments, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

J

Job Role

Job roles are jobs you can hold in your organization as you proceed along a career path.  When you create a job role, you create a job title. When you add a job role to a career path, you create a job title and indicate the proficiency level a member with that job role needs to achieve in each job role skill. Job Roles are one of the Skills Readiness Solution tools.

Job Role Path

Job role paths are specific training plans that QA has identified as helping a learner prepare for a particular job. The job role paths are Cloud Architect, Data Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, and Software Engineer. Each job role path has multiple options for various experience levels to help learners get ready for a position with that job role.

K

Knowledge Checks

A knowledge check is a short, 3-to-5 question quiz that appears at the end of most lessons. The questions in the knowledge check specifically cover the content in the lesson so you can check your understanding of the concepts.

L

Lab Challenges

A lab challenge sets up a scenario and challenges you to solve a problem. Beyond just taking a test to answer questions about using a technology, lab challenges let you show your problem-solving skills, all in a secure sandbox environment with no additional costs, no new accounts, and no test instances to clean up at the end.

courses

courses are objective-driven learning experiences that combine the theory, technical knowledge, and hands-on practice to master skills using industry-leading technologies and major cloud platforms.

Lessons

A lesson is a content type you can find in the training library. A lesson is typically made up of a series of video lectures followed by a knowledge check quiz.

Licenses

When you invite a new member to your account, you assign that member a license. The type of license you assign depends on whether the member needs to access training content.

M

Member Import

Bulk member import is a feature to make it easy to add many members to your account with a simple file upload.

Mobile App

The QA mobile app lets you continue your online learning from your desktop to your mobile device. Some users do all of their QA learning through the app exclusively. The mobile app is available for iOS and Android.

O

Organization

Your organization is your teams and members. Teams can be nested within your organization.

P

Playground Labs

Lab playgrounds are a kind of lab — QA's interactive learning tool. Playground labs provide a safe and secure sandbox environment for you to explore your own ideas, follow along with QA lessons, or answer your own questions through experimentation. While other types of labs have associated objectives, playground labs simply offer a chance to explore for an extended period of time without needing to install the software.

Programs

Programs automate the process of assigning training to your team members. Programs are one of the Skills Readiness Solution Tools and you can use them by themselves or together with Job Roles to optimize your training automation.

R

Reports API

QA's API support for reports lets enterprises automate report generation and retrieval. With the report API, you can integrate your QA reports directly into your corporate dashboards so you can understand your teams' progress in a central location. The reports API functionality is predictable and reliable.

Reports

Reports are data from your QA account about your organization, platform usage, skills, and content.

Roles

A member's role determines what tools the member can access within your QA account. A member has a "company role" (admin or not) and, if the member is part of a team, a "team role" (manager, stakeholder, or member).

S

Skill Profile

The Skill Profile summarizes your level of mastery of the skills for which you've completed assessments. If you complete a quiz, exam, or lab challenge that assesses a particular skill, the Skill Profile shows a score for that skill based on your performance on the assessments. See How QA Calculates Skill Scores for details on how the system calculates the scores.

Smart Assessments

A smart assessment is a test to evaluate your proficiency with a particular job role skill. This type of test gets to a reliable score by adapting the question difficulty based on your performance on previous questions. 

Each smart assessment takes 10-20 minutes to complete and includes about 20 questions. Each smart assessment measures only one job role skill, so you need to take several of them to get a complete picture of your proficiency in a technology. 

Smart Skills

Smart Skills represent technology competencies that your team members need for their job. Smart Skills are a special kind of skill for the Skills Readiness Solution. When you create a Career Path, you can use Smart Skills. You use the stars in the matrix to indicate what score a member needs for each Smart Skill for each Job Role in the Career Path.

SSO

When you set up SSO, users at your company can use their regular network credentials to sign in to the web platform and mobile app. You configure SSO with whatever identity provider your company uses, such as OneLogin, Okta, Delinea, or Azure AD.

Single sign-on uses SAML 2 and currently supports only SP-initiated workflows.

T

Teams

A team is a group of team members, plus one or more team managers. Teams onboard together, complete training plans together, and appear in reports and analytics together. A single member can be on multiple teams, as a member, stakeholder, or team manager.

Training Goal

A training goal determines how the automation of a Program works. You set the training goal as the first step in creating a Program.

Training Plan

A training plan is a tool to schedule and manage completing one or more courses and exams. Training plans give you centralized control of the training experience for teams or members on the QA platform.