Boris Beizer - Software Testing Techniques (1983)

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

Boris Beizer
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
More than the act of testing, the act of designing tests is one of the best bug preventers known.

Boris Beizer
If the objective of testing were to prove that a program is free of bugs, then not only would testing be practically impossible, but it would also be theoretically impossible.

Boris Beizer
In programming, it's often the buts in the specification that kill you.

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

Boris Beizer
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
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