Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming, Second Edition

Proper Testing Is Vital

When you finish writing your application, you aren't completely done with the program. You must now turn to the task of debugging the program. You want to get as many bugs out of the program as possible. For obvious reasons, you don't want the user of your program finding all kinds of mistakes that you made. Therefore, you must thoroughly test the program. Here are the typical testing steps that programmers should follow before distributing a final version of the program to users:

1. Perform desk checking.

2. Perform a beta test.

3. Compare results of the beta test against the old system's parallel test results.

Desk Checking

Most programmers go through a series of desk checks on their programs. Desk checking is the process of checking ...