Testing

Regardless of what you may have heard, the people involved in the development of a software product are human beings. As such, they are apt to make mistakes. The job of a tester is to identify these mistakes. Of course, the testers themselves will be just as fallible, which is why testing tends to be an iterative process - anything that gets missed or misdiagnosed in one wave of testing will hopefully get corrected at a later juncture.

It is well known in the computer industry that faults identified early in the development life cycle are far less costly to fix. In an ideal world, the requirements of a software product would be thoroughly tested before a single line of code is written, then each atomic segment of the code would be tested in isolation before being built into a system, then the system would be tested before being released to client users. In practice, this seldom, if ever, happens. The time and budget constraints endemic in the commercial world often result in the testing phase being compressed to the end of the development life cycle, after the code has been written and before the product goes out. The wisdom of this is questioned on several of the pages that you'll find by following the links below, but it remains the case that software companies consider that confinement of testing to last minute bug finding is an acceptable risk.

Related links on the internet

StickyMinds.com

Superb collection of articles covering all aspects of software testing and project management.

SQATester.com

Articles, tutorials and discussions on testing techniques including the writing of bug reports and test plans. Plus links to several useful software tools, some of which are available for download.

Testing Foundations

Good site written by someone with over a decade of experience in testing, development and management. We're particularly impressed by the Classic Testing Mistakes article.

philosophe.com

This "web site devoted to quality assurance for web sites" is a collection of essays by Quality Assurance professional Derek Sisson. Although the emphasis is on QA, there is a wealth of information here that will be of interest and value to managers, designers, developers and testers alike.

Software QA and Testing Resource Center

Information about software testing, related links and testing tools. Contains clear definitions of concepts such as 'test case' and 'test plan' that give a simple, yet valuable, grounding in the subject.