Code Craft

Reality Check

The two simple questions What is testing? and Why do you test? seem painfully obvious. Yet all too often, adequate software testing is not performed—or it is not performed at the appropriate stage of production. Good testing is a skill. Actually doing some testing is more than many programmers achieve; the mere mention of testing is enough to make most of them break out in a cold sweat. “The single most important rule of testing is to do it.” (Kernighan Pike 99)

Testing is a distinct and separate activity from debugging, although their boundaries blur, and the two often get mixed up together. Testing is a methodical process of proving the existence, or lack thereof, of faults in your software. Debugging is the act of tracking down ...