Glossary term: System-level Testing

A test activity whose goal is to determine whether a constellation of Nodes deliver the expected distributed functionality.

Unlike Protocol-level Testing, system-level testing ignores the involved protocols but focuses on what the system – all the Nodes in the tested Constellation – does as a whole.

For example, in system-level testing, a test may test that:

• if user A follows user B,
• and if B posts something,
• then user A will receive the post.

On its own, system-level testing makes no statement about whether or not a given Node, even if it successfully passes system-level testing, correctly implements any particular protocol.