A Word on Testing

Abstract

You have now written your first complete Java program. Most of the rest of this book will be about Java, but in many ways writing a program is only half of the story. If a program is going to be truly useful the programmer and, more importantly, the program’s intended final users must have confidence in the results that it produces. They must be sure that the results they see from the program are correct. Business users are potentially going to base costly business decisions on the results produced by the programs they use, pilots are going to trust navigational systems in their aircraft, and so on. This brings us to a brief pause from looking at Java. This chapter looks briefly at how and why computer programs are tested.