The Software Engineering Process From the Software Testing Viewpoint
Abstract
For our senior project, we worked as interns at a Kalamazoo
software development company, I/Net, Inc. Owned in part by IBM,
I/Net was developing a product which had been in the development
stages for over a year. At the time of our hiring, coding for the
product had just begun.
When we were hired as interns at I/Net, we were brought on as
testers for an OS/2 product under development for IBM. We first
felt somewhat apprehensive about being testers since we envisioned
rather monotonous work of endlessly entering two numbers into a
program to see if the answer was always the sum of the two
numbers. The descriptions of what we would be doing were
extremely vague as the product, under contract with IBM, is IBM
confidential. Only until after signing legal documents were we
allowed any information about the system. This first briefing
about the program did not do much to alleviate our apprehensions
since we did not understand most of what we were told. It is only
now that we realize that this is part of the process of software
engineering, the series of steps in which software is designed,
coded, and tested. This paper is designed in three stages: a brief introduction to
software engineering; a discussion of software testing; and a
review of our work at I/Net. However, due to the confidential
nature of the product that was being developed, we cannot go into
any detail in regard to the code and the functions involved with
this product. Therefore, in many cases, some deliberately vague
terms have been used in our explanation of our responsibilities at
I/Net. A term that will be used frequently in this paper is API,
or Application Program Interface, any routine immediately
accessible by the end user. A SPI, or Support Program Interface,
is only accessible from the APIs. As we worked primarily with
APis, the terms routine and API will be used interchangeably from
here forward. The intention of the paper is to explain some of
the problems in software development as well as to discuss some
ways to increase the power of programming.
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