Seven Testing Principles

Seven testing principles:

Principle 1: Testing shows presence of defects--Testing can show that defects are present, but cannot prove that there are no defects. Testing reduce the probabilily of undiscovered defects remaining in the software but, even if no defects are found, it is not a proof of correctness.

Principle 2: Exhaustive testing is impossible--Testing everything (all combinations of inputs and preconditions)is not feasible except for trivial cases. Instead of exhaustive testing, we use risks and priorities to focus testing efforts.

Principle 3: Early testing--Testing activities should starts as early as possible in the software of system development life cycle and should be focused on defined objectives.

Principle 4: Defect clustering--A small number of modules contain most of the defects discovered during pre-release testing or show the most operational failures.

Principle 5: Pesticide paradox--If the same tests are repeated over and over again, eventually the same set of test cases will no longer find any new bugs. To overcome this 'pesticide paradox', the test cases need to be regularly reviewed and revised, and new and different tests need to be written to exercise different parts of the software or system to potentially find more defects.

Principle 6: Testing is context dependent--Testing is done differently in different contexts. For example, safety-critical software is tested differently from an e-commerce site.

Principle 7: Absence-of-errors fallacy--Finding and fixing defects does not help if the system built is unusable and does not fulfill the user's needs and expectations.