The Practice of Programming

Chapter 6: Testing

In ordinary computational practice by hand or by desk machines, it is the custom to check every step of the computation and, when an error is found, to localize it by a backward process starting from the first point where the error is noted.

Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics

Testing and debugging are often spoken as a single phrase but they are not the same thing. To over-simplify, debugging is what you do when you know that a program is broken. Testing is a determined, systematic attempt to break a program that you think is working.

Edsger Dijkstra made the famous observation that testing can demonstrate the presence of bugs, but not their absence. His hope is that programs can be made correct by construction, so that there are ...