Testing

Abstract

Testing is an important process that is performed to support quality assurance. Testing activities support quality assurance by gathering information about the nature of the software being studied. These activities consist of designing test cases, executing the software with those test cases, and examining the results pro- duced by those executions. Studies indicate that more than fifty percent of the cost of software development is devoted to testing, with the percentage for testing crit- ical software being even higher. As software becomes more pervasive and is used more often to perform crit- ical tasks, it will be required to be of higher quality. Unless we can find efficient ways to perform effective testing, the percentage of development costs devoted to testing will increase significantly. This report briefly as- sesses the state of the art in software testing, outlines some future directions in software testing, and gives some pointers to software testing resources.