Software Testing - Introduction

Software Testing is the process of executing a program or system with the intent of finding errors. Or, it involves any activity aimed at evaluating an attribute or capability of a program or system and determining that it meets its required results. Software is not unlike other physical processes where inputs are received and outputs are produced. Where software differs is in the manner in which it fails. Most physical systems fail in a fixed (and reasonably small) set of ways. By contrast, software can fail in many bizarre ways. Detecting all of the different failure modes for software is generally infeasible.

Unlike most physical systems, most of the defects in software are design errors, not manufacturing defects. Software does not suffer from corrosion, wear-and-tear -- generally it will not change until upgrades, or until obsolescence. So once the software is shipped, the design defects -- or bugs -- will be buried in and remain latent until activation.

Software bugs will almost always exist in any software module with moderate size: not because programmers are careless or irresponsible, but because the complexity of software is generally intractable -- and humans have only limited ability to manage complexity. It is also true that for any complex systems, design defects can never be completely ruled out.






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