Quotes About Testing

If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

Stan Spray, a Sandia engineer who burned, crushed, and routinely tortured nuclear weapon components to discover their flaws

It is hard to open yourself to someone who might really love you. I kept trying to drive Ken away and he kept passing the test by staying.

the lack of testing meant that intelligence analysts lacked robust feedback loops

Solvay Business School Professor Paul Verdin and I developed a perspective that frames an organization's strategy as a hypothesis rather than a plan.62 Like all hypotheses, it starts with situation assessment and analysis –strategy's classic tools. Also, like all hypotheses, it must be tested through action. When strategy is seen as a hypothesis to be continually tested, encounters with customers provide valuable data of ongoing interest to senior executives.

I'm sure that's okay for a magazine or a book," he went on. "But this is the SAT. You can't get away with that stuff on the SAT.

The ultimate judge in science is always what nature itself reveals based on observations, experiments, models, and testing. Science is not merely a body of knowledge, but a method by which we attempt to understand nature and how it behaves.

As a result, astronomy is sometimes called an observational science; we often make our tests by observing many samples of the kind of object we want to study and noting carefully how different samples vary.

Don't gloss over a routine or piece of code involved in the bug because you "know" it works. Prove it. Prove it in this context, with this data, with these boundary conditions.

All software you write will be tested—if not by you and your team, then by the eventual users—so you might as well plan on testing it thoroughly.

maintaining good regression tests is the key to refactoring with confidence.

if, as seems probable, the effort [the U.S. invasion of Iraq] encounters greater resistance than its architects imagine, our way of life may find itself tested in ways that will make the Vietnam War look like a mere blip in American history. (March 2003)

My sister learned she was a carrier for a recessive disease, Bloom syndrome, late in one of her pregnancies. I remember the panicked call and the weeks of worry as she and her husband awaited his test results; if he was also a carrier, this meant their daughter had a one in four chance of being born with the disorder.

Drug testing for recipients of various welfare programs - I really think that's something that needs to be considered.

Learning should be engaging. Testing should not be the be all and end all. All students should have a broad curriculum that includes the arts and enrichment. Students should have opportunities to work in teams and engage in project-based learning. And student and family well-being should be front and center.

Abraham's willingness to plunge a dagger through the heart of his young son because God, without any explanation, ordered it. We learn in this story that the correctness of an action was not judged by such considerations as apparent senselessness, harmfulness, injustice, or usual moral standards, but by the mere command of a higher authority.

Life never tires of testing the proposition that life must go on.

When life takes the wind out of your sails, it is to test you at the oars.

But I can write my tests later", you say. No, you can't. Not really. Oh, you can write some tests later. You can even approach high coverage later if you are careful to measure it. But the tests you write after the fact are defense. Tests you write first are offense. After-the-fact tests are written by someone who is already vested in the code and already knows how the problem was solved. There's just no way those tests can be anywhere near as incisive as tests written first.

Dijkstra once said, "Testing shows the presence, not the absence, of bugs." In other words, a program can be proven incorrect by a test, but it cannot be proven correct. All that tests can do, after sufficient testing effort, is allow us to deem a program to be correct enough for our purposes.

First Law You may not write production code until you have written a failing unit test. Second Law You may not write more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail, and not compiling is failing. Third Law You may not write more production code than is sufficient to pass the currently failing test.

The unit tests are documents. They describe the lowest-level design of the system.

Code, without tests, is not clean. No matter how elegant it is, no matter how readable and accessible, if it hath not tests, it be unclean. Dave

A system that is comprehensively tested and passes all of its tests all of the time is a testable system. That's an obvious statement, but an important one. Systems that aren't testable aren't verifiable. Arguably, a system that cannot be verified should never be deployed.