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From: shimeall@taurus.cs.nps.navy.mil (timothy shimeall)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: separate SW testing newsgroup
Summary: But machines CANT do it
Message-ID: <1790@taurus.cs.nps.navy.mil>
Date: 17 Dec 90 20:34:28 GMT
References: <5512@taylord> <1990Dec12.213754.27370@ashtate> <5789@catfish10.UUCP> <916@pdxgate.UUCP> <278@smds.UUCP>
Reply-To: shimeall@cs.nps.navy.mil (Tim Shimeall)
Organization: Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey CA
Lines: 32

In article <278@smds.UUCP> rh@smds.UUCP (Richard Harter) writes:
>Well my humble view is that testing is drudge work.  That's why you have
>machines do it.  People are supposed to design and implement the procedures
>that let the machines do it.

A worthy goal, but there's one small fly in that soup.  The problem of
matching a program to its specification is, in the general case, provably 
reducable to the halting problem.  In short, you can't produce an
totally automated software testing system to test software in
general.  It may be possible (but VERY difficult) to create software
that tests specific applications automatically -- but that's going to
be FAR harder than creating any piece of software to fulfill that
application (consider that the testing system must be able to handle
all of the functions of the application system, plus be able to
recoginize all of the possible failure modes in the application system
[the latter being a VERY large set for real-world software]).  Given
that you don't want to do "drudge work" in the first place, are you
willing to give over several years of your life to automating that 
very "drudge work" (and testing your automation)?  And willing to repeat
that effort every time you change applications?

Indeed, there are a lot of philosophical reasons why you may not WANT
testing automated.  Consider: testing's purpose is to assure the
quality of the software.  Don't you want that assurance based on the
judgement of a responsible individual, rather than based on individual
judgement encoded in a piece of software?  Consider that the software
author in the latter case may be totally uninterested in YOUR project,
but only in selling his/her testing tool...
				Tim

-- 
Tim Shimeall ((408) 646-2509)