Hi, I'd like to try a little bit of crowdsourcing with this question.
This is the picture the way I know it. Can you help complete it?
Which is the oldest software testing reference you know in academic literature?
- Wikipedia has a very brief history section assigning "the separation of testing to debugging" to Myers, Glenford J. (1979). The Art of Software Testing. John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-04328-7.
Yet…
- Royce paper is from 1970 (http://www-scf.usc.edu/~csci201/lectures/Lecture11/royce1970.pdf) Software testing is part of the lifecycle, so the terminology must be older.
Quick google searches will frame the origin on either:
- Jouran (about 1951 Quality Handbook), or
- Baker (apparently on a review of Dan McCracken's book Digital Computer Programming)
But.. What would be the first academic (peer-reviewed) reference you know that qualifies/defines/mention Software Testing?
A search of the ACM Digital library returns quite a few papers from the 1950s that discuss software testing. Myers book was one the first about the subject. The Juran paper is not about software.
https://dl.acm.org/action/doSearch?fillQuickSearch=false&target=advanced&expand=dl&field1=AllField&text1=software+AND+testing&AfterYear=1950&BeforeYear=1957&queryID=50%2F4795290808&startPage=0&pageSize=50
Thank you, Robert V. Binder ... There are a few Jewels in that search.
On topic, I would choose this one: Article Simulation Techniques for the Test and Evaluation of Real-Ti...
"This paper ....suggest the use of Test Equipment....for providing simulated input o for large real-time systems" :-) If they told me this was written yesterday, I would believe it.
Do you have any favourites on that list?
Cheers,
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Of topic.. I was amused by some of the titles "Experiments in chess" and this one in particular:
"Computer programming and coding at the high school level" (Article Computer programming and coding at the high school level
)
No favorites, as I have not read any of these papers. However, they suggest to me that from the earliest days of software, there has been a recognition that imagining a strategy for computation and reducing that to working software is not sufficient to produce software that is reliable over most (let alone all) conditions in which it will operate. The motivation (and need) for testing and other kinds of verification and validation remains the same.
How about the following books?
Chapter 13 Program checkout in "Digital Computer Programming" by D. D. McCracken, 1957.
Chapter 10 Program Testing in "Computer Programming Fundamentals" by H. Leeds and G. Weinberg, 1961.
FYI;
Software Testing Books Timeline
http://a-lifelong-tester.cocolog-nifty.com/Testing_Books_TL.html
Robert V. Binder Yes... just amazing that we are discussing similar things all these years after.
Keizo Tatsumi thanks for compiling and sharing that timeline. Excellent archaeological work :-). I'll take some time to browse through it. Robert, yours is in Keizo's timaline.
Cheers,
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