The planners of the project had not envisaged the number of terminals required
(this was in an age before PCs, but after the invention of the word processor). As the project
???progressed,??? the numbers of developers dwindled from 365 at the rate of about 1 per day. There
was a large number of tests written by a dedicated test team. Fairly early on they started testing,
and found, unsurprisingly, a large number of bugs.
Deadlines loomed. There was no chance of simply declaring a delay and fixing the bugs. In
desperation the managers decided to throw out all the tests which found bugs, but not to substitute
them with any others. So when the police chiefs came to the demonstration nothing untoward
was visible and it was proposed to install the system forthwith.
Imagine how happy the policemen were with a system which both lacked key features and whose
response time was best measured with a calendar. The British software house went swiftly bankrupt.
The new chairman, who had taken over on the day the trials started, never had a chance to resolve
anything.
O
18
Manage Software Testing
commercial and operating environment, and the product??™s operating environment. There are two questions
in particular:
1. Is the product ready for release? See section 4.6.5.
2. Have we sufficient test coverage? See section 2.8.
Managing testing requires that you ask these kinds of questions so that if the answer is ???no,??? it will be
very clear to all concerned
why
it is ???no.
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