Hi Again!

My past post on ‘apparently untestable systems‘ turned out to be a very cool experience. I talked with a lot of friends about it, and also had a very informative thread running on the comp.software.testing usenet group. The discussion was called “Is every single program testable? How do you deal with ‘untestable’ software?

That thread was so helpful to further my understanding of testing, that I’ll put here a summary. It surely will make a good reference for me on the future, and I hope this will be useful for others too.

So, in order to continue and understand, read the ‘He Who Can Not Be Tested‘ post. All the discussion started from the questions in there:
– Do you think there are types of software which cannot be tested to a satisfactory degree?
– So how would you test software like this (of Dr. Parnas)? Or would you, as was his approach, just refuse to write and test it?

I’ll condense the responses here, and will add a note (and maybe a link) about each person. Note: The responses are edited and rearranged from the original replies, not really verbatim (although I changed the wording very little). Read the rest of this entry »