The Go Programming Language

11. Testing

Maurice Wilkes, the developer of EDSAC, the first stored-program computer, had a startling insight while climbing the stairs of his laboratory in 1949. In Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer, he recalled, “The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.” Surely every programmer of a stored-program computer since then can sympathize with Wilkes, though perhaps not without some bemusement at his naïveté about the difficulties of software construction.

Programs today are far larger and more complex than in Wilkes’s time, of course, and a great deal of effort has been spent on techniques to make this complexity manageable. Two techniques ...