State-of-the-Art Software Testing

PROGRESS IN SOFTWARE engineering often appears agonizingly slow. Yet when you look back and take stock, you can see that the software we develop today benefits from practices that would have been considered fanciful during the implementation of the system we might aim to replace. This is the case with software testing. A couple of decades ago, many parts of software were tested only manually or not at all. The integration of testing into development was through a wall over which developers threw the software to dedicated testers. Test coverage analysis and A/B testing were techniques many of us only heard of in college and never saw applied in practice. The most striking sign of progress is visible in industrial practice, which used to trail academic research at an embarrassing distance but now often leads the way.1 So here’s how to test software like a pro.