CHAPTER 3 Making Programs Fail
Before a program can be debugged, we must set it up such that it can be tested—that is, executed with the intent to make it fail. In this chapter, we review basic testing techniques, with a special focus on automation and isolation.
3.1 TESTING FOR DEBUGGING
User reports are not the only way of learning about problems. Typically, most problems (and in the best of all worlds, all problems) are found by testing at the developer’s site before they ever could be experienced by a user. Testing is the process of executing a program with the intent of producing some problem. Once such a problem has been found by testing, the process of tracing down the defect and fixing it is the same as if the problem had been reported ...
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