Chapter 8. Software Testing
The quality of the software is the responsibility of the entire team. Throughout the entire software project, the team does many things to find and prevent defects. Once the software has been built, it's time to look back and make sure that it meets the requirements. The goal of software testing is to make sure that the product does what the users and stakeholders need it to do. Software testers review the final product to make sure that the initial requirements have been met.
In software testing, quality is defined as "conformance to requirements." Every use case, functional requirement, and other software requirement defines a specific behavior that the software must exhibit. When the software does not behave the way that the requirements say it must behave, that is a defect. This means that your software testers are responsible for figuring out whether the software that was produced by the team behaves in the way that the requirements it was built from say that it should.
Every engineering discipline defines quality in exactly this way. When an auto manufacturer provides a specification to a subcontractor to create a part for a car, that specification contains tolerances for various measurements for that part. When the subcontractor ships a box of those parts back to the manufacturer to be built into the car, any part that does not meet the requirements in the specification is considered defective. And it's exactly the same with software—any feature ...
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