Essay About Software Development And Testing Area

Vegas Case
Unfortunately, software development has been characterized from its origins by a
serious want of empirical facts tested against reality, which provide evidence of the
advantages or disadvantages of the different methods, techniques or tools used in the
development of software systems. In this respect, the type of knowledge used in this
discipline can be considered to be of a relatively low maturity, and developers are
guided by reasoning based on intuition, fashion or market-speak rather than by facts
or undisputed statements proper to an engineering discipline. This paper intends to
analyze the maturity level of the knowledge about a particular part of the software
development, the testing area, and more precisely testing techniques.
This is equally applicable to software testing and is in open opposition to the
importance of software quality control and assurance and, in particular, software
testing. Testing is the last chance during development to detect and correct possible
software defects at a reasonable price. It is a well-known fact that it is a lot more
expensive to correct defects that are detected during later system operation (Davis,
1993). Therefore, it is of critical importance to rely on knowledge that is mature
enough to get predictable results during the testing process.
The selection of the testing techniques to be used is one of the circumstances
during testing where objective and factual knowledge is essential. Testing techniques
determine different criteria for selecting the test cases that will be used as input to the
system under examination, which means that an effective and efficient selection of
test cases conditions the success of the tests. The knowledge for selecting testing
techniques should come from studies that empirically justify the benefits and
application conditions of the different techniques. However, as authors like Hamlet
(1989) have noted, formal and practical studies of this kind do not abound, as: (1) it
is difficult to compare testing techniques, because they do not have a solid theoretical
foundation;