The Art of Software Testing, Second Edition

Chapter 1. A Self-Assessment Test

Since this book was first published 25 years ago, software testing has become both easier and more difficult than ever.

Software testing is more difficult because of the vast array of programming languages, operating systems, and hardware platforms that have evolved. And, while relatively few people used computers in the 1970s, today virtually anyone in business or education could hardly complete a day's work without using a computer. Furthermore, the machines themselves are hundreds of times more powerful than those early devices.

Therefore, the software we write today potentially touches millions of people, enabling them to do their jobs effectively and efficiently—or causing them untold frustration and the cost of lost work or lost business. This is not to say that software is more important today than it was when the first edition of this book was published, but it is safe to say that computers—and the software that drives them—certainly affect more people and more businesses today.

Software testing is easier, in some ways, because the array of software and operating systems is much more sophisticated than ever, providing intrinsic well-tested routines that can be incorporated into applications without the need for a programmer to develop them from scratch. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs), for example, can be built from a development language's libraries, and, since they are preprogrammed objects that have been debugged and tested previously, ...