Ace the 2025 Software Quality Assurance Challenge – Elevate Your Testing Skills!

The integration testing process during the development phase focuses on verifying the interactions between different components or modules of a system. It builds upon the design principles that outline how these modules function together as part of a larger architecture.

Choosing system design as the correct answer is appropriate because system design lays the foundational principles that dictate how different parts of the software application will interact and integrate. This includes defining interfaces, data flow, and interactions between modules, which are critical for successful integration testing. The design serves as a blueprint, providing a clear outline for developers to follow, ensuring that components can work together as intended when they are tested in combination.

In contrast, requirement gathering focuses on understanding what the software needs to achieve from a user's perspective, code pertains to the actual implementation of software, and external specifications define how the system will interact with outside entities. While these elements are essential throughout the development cycle, they do not specifically lay down the design principles necessary for guiding integration testing. The integration tests rely directly on the design principles to confirm that the various components can integrate successfully.