11-6
Chapter One
Basic Concepts and Preliminaries
Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the
second law of thermodynamics, i.e., it always increases.
- Norman Ralph Augustine
1.1 QUALITY REVOLUTION
People seek quality in every man-made artifact. Certainly, the concept of quality did
not originate with software systems. Rather, the quality concept is likely to be as old
as human endeavor to mass produce artifacts and objects of large size. In the past
couple of decades a quality revolution, has been spreading fast throughout the world
with the explosion of the Internet. Global competition, outsourcing, off-shoring,
and increasing customer expectations have brought the concept of quality to the
forefront. Developing quality products on tighter schedules is critical for a company
to be successful in the new global economy. Traditionally, efforts to improve quality
have centered around the end of the product development cycle by emphasizing
the detection and correction of defects. On th ... read full excerpt from Software Testing and Quality Assurance: Theory and Practice ebook
