A Brief History of Software Testing
William E. Lewis, David E. Dobbs, Gunasekaran Veerapillai · Auerbach Publications eBooks · 2017
Modern testing tools are becoming more and advanced and user-friendly. The following describes how software testing activity has evolved, and is evolving, over time. Software testing is the activity of running a series of dynamic executions of software programs after the software source code has been developed. It is performed to uncover and correct as many potential errors as possible before delivery to the customer. In the late 1970s it was stated that testing is a process of executing a program with the intent of finding an error, proving that it works. The new definition emphasized that a good test case is one that has a high probability of finding an as-yet-undiscovered error. The generation of automated testing tools introduced added variable test data to be used in conjunction with the capture/replay features. The difference between static capture/replay variable is that in the former case the inputs and outputs are fixed, whereas in the latter the inputs outputs are variable.