Software Inspections, Code Reviews, and Safety Arguments

Abstract

In the chapter on software testing, we have seen that there are numerous strategies by which to assess the quality of a software system by executing it. However, the effectiveness of testing is subject to a range of limitations; there is rarely a complete and reliable oracle, and there is no accepted means by which to generate adequate test sets (or even by which to measure adequacy). Furthermore, many aspects of software quality (such as the maintainability of the source code) cannot be established by testing.