Testing and Integration

This chapter covers two major subjects: software testing and software integration. The goal of software testing is to discover defects in software, not to show that none are present. That is, software testing cannot prove that software is correct (meets its specifications) for any realistic system. Software integration is the process of combining individual software modules and subsystems into a single working product. Software integration is not a trivial task, especially if the individual software units were developed in different locations or even by different companies and organizations that are separated geographically. Most testing techniques are often described as using either a black-box or a white-box approach. Black-box testing refers to the concept that a module is to be tested as to how well it meets its specifications, without any attention being paid to the structure of the actual source code within the module.