Testing is essential to producing high-quality and well-performing software. The secret to productive testing is to make it easy, reliable, and routine. If testing is difficult or tests regularly fail because of issues unrelated to the software (for example, environmental problems), then tests will not be performed or the results will be ignored. This will cause you to miss genuine problems and ship bugs that you could have easily avoided.
There are many different varieties of testing, and you may be familiar with the more common cases used for functional verification. In this book, we will mainly focus on tests pertaining to performance. However, the advice here is applicable to many types of testing.
