March 2015
Beginner
480 pages
14h 12m
English
Content preview from Beginning Software Engineering
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CHAPTER 8 Testing
Testing is the process of comparing the invisible to the ambiguous, so as to avoid the unthinkable happening to the anonymous.
—JAMES BACH
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:
- Goals of testing
- Reasons why you might not want to remove a bug
- How to prioritize bugs
- Kinds of tests and testing techniques
- Good testing habits
- Methods for estimating number of bugs
It’s a software engineering axiom that all nontrivial programs contain bugs. Actually, it’s such an important point that it deserves to be put in its own note and explained with an example.
For example, Windows 2000 was said by some to contain a whopping 63,000+ known bugs when it was shipped. Microsoft quickly retorted that this number didn’t actually count bugs. It included feature requests, notes asking developers to make something work better or more efficiently than it already did, clarification requests, and other nonbug issues. The true bugs, Microsoft explained, were mostly minor issues that wouldn’t seriously hurt users.
No matter how you count them, Windows 2000 contained a lot of “undesirable features” ranging from changes that should probably have been made to indisputable bugs.
You might think that’s the result of shoddy workmanship, but no project of that size could possibly have shipped without any bugs. The industry average number of bugs per thousand lines of code (kilo lines of code or KLOC) is typically estimated at about ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.