History, Purpose And Why Is Software Testing Being Outsourced

I could start by explaining quality assurance processes in preindustrial communities, long before anyone had ever heard of software. But that would actually require writing a book.

So I’ll just instantly note some things that are probably obvious if you think about them, but that you may take for granted. Before the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern capitalism, the calculus of quality assurance was a bit different than it is today. 

Markets were normally monopolized by guilds. Without free market competition, assuring quality wasn’t necessarily necessary for keeping clients happy. And in the absence of strong governments, attempts by the state to prevent defects in products tended to be rare or ineffective.

Software Testing in the Early Days

To know where software testing and quality assurance implement within the history of software, it’s necessary to understand that programmers require to fulfill several distinct goals in order to make the client happy. One of those is debugging. Another includes configuration testing or making sure a program works in all of the environments for which it’s designed. Another is ensuring user-friendliness. And the list goes on.

It’s also worth noting that, early on, programmers managed to work in small teams. They adhered to the “cathedral”-style appearance to software development promoted by Fred Brooks, who argued in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month that programming is easiest when projects are small, finite, and when a lot of testing can be done before releasing products to the public.

Purpose of Software Testing

So what’s the scope of software testing? The definitions you will usually encounter are “to minimize defects” or “to catch bugs early.” These are developer-centric definitions and we as developers tend to communicate these definitions to non-developers.

But what if we determined software testing as “to make software simple, efficient and stress-free for people developing, selling, supporting and buying software?” As developers, we want to reduce bugs and analyze them as early as possible, but software testing is so much more than that. It is about having an outward focus and serving internal and external clients.

You can also read this full article at https://medium.com/@alishahndrsn/history-purpose-and-why-is-software-testing-being-outsourced-eb05f41689da