Chapter Two · Context
How Software Gets Built: the Tester's Context
Testing doesn't float in space — it lives inside a process, works from requirements, and happens on specific copies of the product. One compact chapter of context: the stages every piece of software passes through and why testing moved earlier, the agile rhythm nearly every team runs on, the user stories and acceptance criteria that are your daily raw material, and the environment ladder that decides where your testing actually happens.
Chapter 1 gave you the profession; this chapter gives you its habitat. Every question a new tester asks in their first week — when do I test things? what do I test them against? where do I test them? — is really a question about how software gets built, and the answers form the working context everything later assumes.
Four topics, deliberately compact — the full story of building software is its own course on this platform, and this chapter takes only the tester's share. The SDLC and the great lesson of moving testing earlier. Agile and the sprint rhythm, where testing becomes a continuous activity with a chair in refinement. Requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria — the "should" behind every comparison you'll ever make. And environments and builds — dev, staging, production, and the two questions that start every bug investigation.