Vegas Case

Unfortunately, software development has been characterized from its origins by a

serious want of empirical facts tested against reality, which provide evidence of the

advantages or disadvantages of the different methods, techniques or tools used in the

development of software systems. In this respect, the type of knowledge used in this

discipline can be considered to be of a relatively low maturity, and developers are

guided by reasoning based on intuition, fashion or market-speak rather than by facts

or undisputed statements proper to an engineering discipline. This paper intends to

analyze the maturity level of the knowledge about a particular part of the software

development, the testing area, and more precisely testing techniques.

This is equally applicable to software testing and is in open opposition to the

importance of software quality control and assurance and, in particular, software

testing. Testing is the last chance during development to detect and correct possible

software defects at a reasonable price. It is a well-known fact that it is a lot more

expensive to correct defects that are detected during later system operation (Davis,

1993). Therefore, it is of critical importance to rely on knowledge that is mature

enough to get predictable results during the testing process.

The selection of the testing techniques to be used is one of the circumstances

during testing where objective and factual knowledge is essential. Testing techniques

determine different criteria for selecting the test cases that will be used as input to the

system under examination, which means that an effective and efficient selection of

test cases conditions the success of the tests. The knowledge for selecting testing

techniques should come from studies that empirically justify the benefits and

application conditions of the different techniques. However, as authors like Hamlet

(1989) have noted, formal and practical studies of this kind do not abound, as: (1) it

is difficult to compare testing techniques, because they do not have a solid theoretical

foundation;