Software Inspection - More Effective Than Testing It is for this reason than many organizations, rather than test to exhaustion, are enhancing their test efforts through software inspection. There are always more test cases to be tried, so testing is never finished, only abandoned. Errors and bugs still find their way into applications, and testing can rarely check all possible scenarios. Testing is a cyclical process that leads to incremental improvements, but it is impossible to perform "testing in" quality. Not surprisingly, one of the largest time and resource drains in a development lifecycle is testing, often comprising as much as 50 percent of a project’s life cycle. Just as we know how disruptive failures can be, we all know how often schedules slip. The production of highly reliable software, on time and within budget, is a constant challenge for the software industry. Perhaps the most famous of these is the Year 2000 date fault. These kinds of conditions can be guarded against, yet frequently they are not. Many different types of conditions can cause exceptions including an empty data file, insufficient memory, type mismatch, wrong command-line argument, protection violation, and bad data returned from another program. In general, an exception is any unexpected condition or event, usually environment- or data-driven, which would cause an otherwise operational program to fail. Exception failures can account for up to two-thirds of all system crashes, hence, are worthy of serious attention. Software fails mainly for two reasons: logic errors in the software and exception failures. The operand error occurred due to an unexpectedly high value of an internal function result. The data conversion instructions were not protected from causing an operand error.". The floating-point number, which was converted, had a value greater than what could be represented by a 16-bit signed integer. The exception was "caused during execution of a data conversion from 64-bit floating point to 16-bit signed integer value. In the case of the Ariane rocket failure the problem was identified as a software exception in the inertial reference system. Maiden flight 501 of the European Space Agency’s new Ariane 5 heavy-lift rocket - due to a simple exception failure the rocket exploded 40 seconds into the mission, losing an uninsured scientific payload valued at roughly 500 million dollars.Oxford Health Plans billing problem - billing and payment software problems resulted in failure to collect hundreds of millions of dollars from member hospitals and doctors, causing large losses and a drop in Oxford’s market value of $3 billion in one day.New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles computer problem - a new software program failed in the first hour after installation, forcing all 45 field offices to turn away thousands seeking licenses, registrations and other services.Reports of serious disruptions caused by software faults are all too commonplace: We all know how disruptions caused by faulty software can be costly and even devastating in terms of lost business, damage to customers, and declines in stock value, which in turn may lead to litigation. The advantages and necessitites of a Year 2000 automated software inspection can help locate software faults that extensive testing could miss, as well as aid companies in producing higher reliability software, on time and within budget.Īutomated software inspections can quickly locate software faults - even lingering Y2K faults - that exhaustive test cycles might altogether miss, helping companies produce higher reliability software, on time and within budget.
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