| The Optimistic View Testing has matured into a professional IT subdiscipline whose importance is being increasingly recognized by senior management at the same time that software quality and reliability is assuming greater importance in the general community. The Pessimistic View Testing is a low-status function that the most talented staff avoid, programmers view as an impediment, and senior management underfunds. And despite the improvements in our development and testing processes, the increasing complexity of software fully offsets our gains, leaving us with the same incidence of bugs that we've always had. | "IT is not ready to even attempt fault-free software in useful applications, and we can't justify the budget to try." Don Estes, Guest Editor Opening Statement Mirrors, Rockets, and Lives: Considering the Limits of Testing A "Satisficing" Approach to Software Testing in a Many-Flawed World Right Up Front: Strategies for Prioritizing Test Activities A People-Satisfying IDEA Seven Truths About Peer Reviews | |
| Next Issue Plotting a Testing Course in the IT Universe Guest Editor: Don Estes In today's altered IT universe, the issues of agile software development and risk management are rising in concert, changing the way we manage our enterprises. Like businesspeople everywhere, IT professionals are seeing these issues in a new light. Even software testers, who have historically approached their work in a materially different way than their programming counterparts, are considering different techniques in response to agile methods and risk factors. Can the time and financial costs of software testing be mitigated in an agile methodology framework? Will testing in the context of an enterprise-wide risk management approach contribute to improved testing methods and results? Find out next month when Guest Editor Don Estes returns to Cutter IT Journal with "Plotting a Testing Course in the IT Universe." | ||
Scientifically thorough testing is prohibitively expensive for complex products like software. As a result, software testing is always a compromise between theoretically perfect and "it didn't blow up, so ship it." In this issue of Cutter IT Journal, we debate how we can make software more reliable without breaking the bank. How much testing is "enough" when software is increasingly critical to so many products and services? Is testing really just an exercise in risk management? Join us for the first of two issues on this vital topic. Remember: what you don't know about software testing can kill you.
