The Art of Software Testing
Introduction and Chapter 1: A Self-Assessment Test
Glen Myers
Wiley
Third Edition, 2012
Introduction
In a typical programming project approximately 50 percent of the elapsed time and
more than 50 percent of the total cost is expended in testing
You might expect that by this time program testing would have been refined into an exact science
Less seems to be known about software testing than about any other aspect of software development
Glen Myers' book (and this course) is a practical, rather than theoretical, discussion of
Software Testing
Chapter 1: A Self-Assessment Test
Low-level impacts of bugs may only inconvenience the end user
Worst impacts can result in large financial losses, harm to people, or death
Chapter 1 task is to write a set of test cases (specific sets of data)
to test properly a relatively simple program
Program reads three integer values
Values represent the lengths of the sides of a triangle
Program displays a message that states whether the triangle is scalene, isosceles, or equilateral
Highly-qualified professional programmers think of,
on the average, only 7-8 of the possible 14 test cases
Testing even a trivial program such as this is not an easy task