Chapter 14Software Testing
14.1 Introduction
Software testing (or “testing”) was the first software quality tool applied as “acceptance testing” to control the software product's quality before its delivery to, or installation at, the customer premises. At first, testing was confined to the final stage of development, after the entire software product had been completed. Later, as the importance of early detection of software defects penetrated as software quality assurance concepts, software development professionals were encouraged to extend testing to the partial in-process products of coding, which led to software module (unit) testing and integration testing. Common to all testing activities is their application through the running of code.
Some authors tend to broaden the scope of testing even further, and consider all quality assurance activities in the software life cycle as types of testing activities. In other words, these authors term all quality activities “tests” whether performed by running the software code or by examining documents.
In this book, we limit the scope of testing to those quality assurance activities performed by running the code. Quality activities performed by examining documents are termed “reviews.”
The definition of software testing applied in this book focuses on the operative characteristics of testing as presented in the definition in Frame 14.1.
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