In the software development world we have a whole cabinet full of testing tasks that can contribute to quality work; here is a list of those most commonly used, in an approximate order of where they happen along the development cycle:
Impact Analysis
Usability testing
Code Review
Risk assessment
Stress testing
Test bed preparation
Test case creation
Test driver development
Functional testing
Regression testing
Boundary Value Analysis
Branch coverage
Error seeding
System Test
Parallel testing
Documentation Review
Integration testing
Acceptance testing
Post implementation validation
Therefore all of our software should be perfect and bug free. Right? In the real world our ability to spend time and money on software testing gets constrained however by the dynamics of staffing, skills, and delivery schedules. So much as I described in this earlier post about appropriate balance, we must carefully choose which test tools to remove from our cabinet to apply to each project. And that my friend, is why software still has bugs.
