Testing Cycles and Product Stability
Years of experience in software development have not helped reduce anxiety levels whenever a project enters the 'Testing' phase of the Software Development Life Cycle. It feels the same as one would feel when parents accompanied you to school to collect your academic results at the end of term examinations. There is always the anxiety of whether the output of the design and coding phase will be able to successfully sustain the test case bombardment. Besides, you would also be anxious to know if there are enough test cases to traverse all paths of the software while testing functionality and QoS parameters - so as to be confident that all loose ends are covered. An even more difficult pill to swallow is a situation where you realize that a number of your tests are failing, and you will have to get back to the customer with the bad news and request an extension. But even after that, how do you gurantee that your product will be defect free ? How do you gurantee that you have not introduced defects unknowingly while fixing the known ones ? Experts would ofcourse recommend a 'thorough peer code review' - but even after that, you would still need a 'tested and passed' certificate before the software is passed to the customer for his acceptance tests.
