You have to know what you're expecting before you give meaning to a test report, otherwise everything looks or sounds right. That's why I'm a strong advocate of the test-first philosophy, whereby developers write their tests to include expected results before they write a line of code. It's what we did fifty years ago, but the practice was gradually lost when industry trends separated testing from development.
From Test-driven Development for Embedded C
TDD helps you go faster... Slowing down is exactly what is needed to go fast!
One test result is worth 1,000 expert opinions. [Wernher von Braun]
From Quality Software Management: Vol 4. Anticipating Change
Testing to improve, not to prove.
Testing is not a stage, but part of a control process embedded in every stage.
From The Lady Tasting Tea
What I discovered working at Pfizer was that very little scientific research can be done alone. It usually requires a combination of minds. This is because it is so easy to make mistakes.
No test can be powerful against all possible alternatives.
From Mind and Nature
Other things being equal (which is not often the case), the old, which has been somewhat tested, is more likely to be viable than the new, which has not been tested at all.
From Management of the Absurd
We need to fail often. If we don't, it means we're not testing our limits.
From The Right Stuff
In the military they always said "flight test" and not "test flying".
What people were seeing on television were, in fact, ordinary test events. Blown engines were par for the course in testing aircraft prototypes and were inevitable in testing an entirely new propulsion system, such as jet or rocket engines.
From We Seven
A test-pilot is fiercely proud of his profession. [Walter Schirra]
In combat, for example, you are thinking about what goes on outside of your airplane… But in test flying you have an entirely different problem. You are concerned about what is going on inside the airplane, and what the aircraft itself is doing. [Deke Slayton]
Each part that goes into the capsule has had a prototype tested to destruction to make sure it can stand the rough ride and the temperature changes. The test procedures are extremely painstaking. First, one part is tested; then two parts are linked together and both of them are tested as a unit. The small units are joined into bigger units for further testing, and this process continues until finally the entire machine is ready for a master test. [Malcomn Scott Carpenter]
From The Pragmatic Programmer
Design to Test.
From The Alchemist
'I had to test your courage,' the stranger said. 'Courage is the quality most essential to understanding the Language of the World.'
From The Importance of Living
We must give up the idea that a man's knowledge can be tested or measured in any form whatsoever.
From The Mind of War
He was always testing the limits - of airplanes, people, science, the military, and, most especially, bureaucracies.
From An Introduction to General Systems Thinking
"Proof" in its original sense was a test applied to substances to determine if they are of satisfactory quality... Over the centuries, the meaning of the word "prove" began to shift, eliminating the negative possibilities...
From Safer C
You can't test quality into software.
From The Mythical Man Month
No part of the schedule are so thoroughly affected by sequential constraints as component debugging and system test.
