Avoiding the Risks of Implementing Testability
Anything can be overdesigned, including testability. Unless there’s a clear plan to use a specific testability feature, it’s a waste of time to implement such a feature. Sometimes testability features can also be security risks. Bret Pettichord related an incident in his seminal paper Design for Testability:[6] “A security flaw in the Palm OS that allowed anyone to access password-protected information took advantage of a test interface.”
[6] Bret Pettichord, Design for Testability (2002), p. 24, www.io.com/~wazmo/papers/design_for_testability_PNSQC.pdf.
Logging output that was designed to unveil the inner workings of software to improve testability can end up revealing too much information, for ...
Get The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
