Developer Testing: Building Quality into Software

Chapter 2. Testing Objectives, Styles, and Roles

Organizations may differ enormously in their views on testing and development and above all, in their opinions on how these two activities should be combined. In this chapter we’ll take a quick look at what testing and quality assurance may look like in different settings and see how developer testing fits into the picture.

Testing and Checking

It’s not uncommon to make a distinction between testing and checking to emphasize the difference between an activity that requires curiosity, flexibility, and the ability to draw conclusions and a tedious process that compares the outcome of performing some action to an expected result. In most cases, the latter is best left to a machine. Thus, a person ...