Quotes by

Boris Beizer

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A good threat is worth a thousand tests.

Boris Beizer

[1990] about publicizing test cases to programmers

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

#test #programmer #Techniques #testing #software

Testing proves a programmer’s failure. Debugging is the programmer’s vindication.

Boris Beizer

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

#failure #test #debug #programmer

Flowcharts have been falling out of favor for over a decade, and before another decade passes they’ll be regarded as curious, archaic relics of a bygone programming era.

Boris Beizer

Flowcharts are essentially equivalent to UML’s activity diagrams

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

Bugs lurk in corners and congregate at boundaries.

Boris Beizer

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

In programming, it’s often the buts in the specification that kill you.

Boris Beizer

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

[...] the semantic fog that exists whenever two programmers attempt to communicate.

Boris Beizer

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

More than the act of testing, the act of designing tests is one of the best bug preventers known. The thinking that must be done to create a useful test can discover and eliminate bugs before they are coded - indeed, test-design thinking can discover and eliminate bugs at every stage in the creation of software, from conception to specification, to design, coding and the rest.

Boris Beizer

Software Testing Techniques

Creating a Software Engineering Culture by Karl Eugene Wiegers

ISBN: 0932633331 Page: 211 This book is available from Amazon

Programmers! Cast out your guilt! Spend half your time in joyous testing and debugging! Stalk bugs with care, methodology, and reason. Build traps for them. Be more artful than those devious bugs and taste the joys of guiltless programming!

Boris Beizer

Chapter 1, Section 1.1.

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

Second law: The complexity barrier. Software complexity (and therefore that of bugs) grows to the limits of our ability to manage that complexity.

Boris Beizer

Chapter 1, Section 1.7.

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

First law: The pesticide paradox. Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffective.

Boris Beizer

Chapter 1, Section 1.7. Boris notes that farmers solve this problem by planting sacrifice crops for the bugs to eat, and laments that programmers are unable to write sacrifice functions.

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

You must be a constructive schizophrenic. Be clear about the difference between your role as a programmer and as a tester. The tester in you must be suspicious, uncompromising, hostile, and compulsively obsessed with destroying, utterly destroying, the programmer's software. The tester in you is your Mr. Hyde - your Incredible Hulk. He must exercise what Gruenberger calls 'low cunning.'

Boris Beizer

Chapter 1, Section 2.3.

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

Forget that lone hacker image if you still cherish it. And if contemporary software engineering with its procedural structure bothers you, if you're blind to the opportunities for expressing your personal creativity within its necessary constraints, if the fast-tight algorithm is still the driving force in your designs - then get out! Find another domain, such as an R&D sandbox or an unreconstructed software shop, in which to play at programming.

Boris Beizer

Chapter 11: Implementation, Section 3.2.2.

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

Programmers are responsible for software quality - quality in their own work, quality in the products that incorporate their work, and quality at the interfaces between components. Quality has never been and will never be tested in. The responsibility is both moral and professional.

Boris Beizer

Chapter 13: Implementation, Section 3.1.

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

Software never was perfect and won't get perfect. But is that a license to create garbage? The missing ingredient is our reluctance to quantify quality.

Boris Beizer

Chapter 2, Section 2.3.

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

Extra features were once considered desirable. We now recognize that 'free' features are rarely free. Any increase in generality that does not contribute to reliability, modularity, maintainability, and robustness should be suspected.

Boris Beizer

Chapter 2, Section 3.2.2.

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

Third law: Code migrates to data. Because of this law there is increasing awareness that bugs in code are only half the battle and that data problems should be given equal attention.

Boris Beizer

Chapter 2, Section 3.4.1.

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

The most common kind of coding bug, and often considered the least harmful, are documentation bugs (i.e., erroneous comments). Although many documentation bugs are simple spelling errors or the result of poor writing, many are actual errors - that is, misleading or erroneous comments. We can no longer afford to discount such bugs, because their consequences are as great as 'true' coding errors. Today programming labor is dominated by maintenance. This will increase as software becomes even longer-lived. Documentation bugs lead to incorrect maintenance actions and therefore cause the insertion of other bugs.

Boris Beizer

Chapter 2: The Taxonomy of Bugs, Section 3.5.

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

A design remedy that prevents bugs is always preferable to a test method that discovers them.

Boris Beizer

Chapter 2: The Taxonomy of Bugs, Section 3.6.7.

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

A test that reveals a bug has succeeded, not failed.

Boris Beizer

Chapter 3: Flowgraphs and Path Testing, Section 8.11.

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

Failure to initialize a shared object can lead to data-dependent bugs caused by residues from a previous use of that object by another transaction. Note that the culprit transaction is long gone when the bug's symptoms are discovered. Because the effect of corruption of dynamic data can be arbitrarily far removed from the cause, such bugs are among the most difficult to catch.

Boris Beizer

Chapter 2, 3.4.2.

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

If you can't test it, don't build it. If you don't test it, rip it out.

Boris Beizer

Second edition, chapter 13, section 3.2.5.

Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer

ISBN: 0442206720 This book is available from Amazon

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Boris Beizer

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