Seven Key Principles of Testing

 

 Testing shows presence of defects:

• Testing can show the defects are present, but cannot prove that there are no defects
• As we find more defects, the probability of undiscovered defects remaining in a system reduces ( decreasing nature).
• However Testing cannot prove that there are no defects present

Exhaustive testing is impossible

• We have learned that we cannot test everything (i.e. all combinations of inputs and per-conditions).
• That is we must prioritize our testing effort using a Risk Based Approach.
• Test designing techniques can be helpful to prioritize the tests

Early testing

• In the software development life cycle testing activities should start as early as possible
• Testing activities should be focused on defined objectives – outlined in the Test Strategy

Defect clustering

• A small number of modules contains most of the defects discovered during pre-release testing or shows the most operational failures.
• Defects are not evenly distributed in a system, they are ‘clustered’
• In other words, most defects found during testing are usually confined to a small number of modules ( 80% of uncovered errors focused in 20% modules of the whole application) “Pareto law”

Pesticide paradox

• Testing identifies bugs, and programmers respond to fix them. as bugs are eliminated by the programmers, the software improves
• If the same kinds of tests are repeated again and again, eventually the same set of test cases will no longer be able to find any new bugs.
• Therefore we must learn, create and use new tests based on new techniques to catch new bugs ( i.e. It is not a matter of repetition. It is a matter of learning and improving)

 

  Testing is context depending

• Testing is basically context dependent. 
• Testing is done differently in different contexts, different kinds of sites are tested differently. For example, safety – critical software is tested differently from an e-commerce site.

Absence – of – errors fallacy

• If the system built is unusable and does not fulfill the user’s needs and expectations then finding and fixing defects does not help.