[TIP] A rare philosophical thought

[Bob Clancy]

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at  1:28 PM, C. Titus Brown wrote:

> ... "testing" is really just "running the code", under actual or
> likely-to-be actual circumstances.  The quality of your test effort 
> can
> be measured by how reflective it is of the actual circumstances under
> which the code will be used, and the cost of the mismatches.
>
> Thoughts?

Testing goes further than your definition above.  It also has to include 
things that "might" go wrong (prioritized by risk and impact).  In other 
words, testing should be a little bit like defensive driving.  Mybe my 
view is a little more "classic QA" than what programmer testers normally 
think of, but past experience has shown me that bugs often happen on the 
fringes beyond what is obvious or usual.  While "test driven" might not 
encourage such corner cases, I believe they have to be added as time, 
testing resources permit.  It's important to use the risk and impact 
measures so you don't go hog-wild creating useless tests that are not 
productive in finding real bugs.

--
Bob
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.idyll.org/pipermail/testing-in-python/attachments/20080801/fa7cea6a/attachment-0001.htm