1.1 Evolution of the Software Testing discipline

The effective functioning of modern systems depends on our ability to produce software in a cost-effective way. The term software engineering was first used at a 1968 NATO workshop in West Germany. It focused on the growing software crisis! Thus we see that the software crisis on quality, reliability, high costs etc. started way back when most of today’s software testers were not even born!

The attitude towards Software Testing underwent a major positive change in the recent years. In the 1950’s when Machine languages were used, testing is nothing but debugging. When in the 1960’s, compilers were developed, testing started to be considered a separate activity from debugging. In the 1970’s when the software engineering concepts were introduced, software testing began to evolve as a technical discipline. Over the last two decades there has been an increased focus on better, faster and cost-effective software. Also there has been a growing interest in software safety, protection and security and hence an increased acceptance of testing as a technical discipline and also a career choice!.

Now to answer, “What is Testing?” we can go by the famous definition of Myers, which says, “Testing is the process of executing a program with the intent of finding errors”