Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

Chapter 6. About the Life Cycle

Testing

Fallacy 7

Random test input is a good way to optimize testing.

Discussion

In Fact 32 (the one about test coverage that says it is nearly impossible to achieve 100 percent coverage), I first brought up the notion of random testing. There I described it as one of the four basic testing approaches. Those four approaches are requirements-driven testing, structure-driven testing, statistics-driven testing, and risk-driven testing. This fallacy is about what I called, at that time, statistics-driven testing.

“Statistics-driven testing” is pretty much just a nicer way of saying random testing. ...