S60 Smartphone Quality Assurance: A Guide for Mobile Engineers and Developers

Chapter 9: Testing as a Tool

It has been said that there is not a single line of code with no defects and the many implications of the word quality have already been considered in earlier chapters. The ways to make high-quality products were also explained earlier. Even though these suggestions are worth following, they do not provide enough information. Software programs have a special nature; no matter how defect-free is the code one tries to implement and no matter how well quality-oriented the organization is, everyone who programs creates defects while coding. This chapter and the following chapters provide information about tools that help to create software that is more error free in general. However, it is important to understand that testing by itself can never improve product quality. There are unfortunate examples where the testing team has been blamed because they found too many defects, as if they had had something to do with the fault creation. The testers' role is very simple: they create awareness about product maturity, nothing else. Another interesting fact is that defects seem to address themselves to the same components. Roughly speaking, 20 per cent of the entire system can contain 80 per cent of all defects.

Figure 9-1. The phases in Quality Assurance.

Figure 9-1 shows an overall plan of the activities that are needed in high-quality product implementation. ...