• Question: How do you know if the software works or not

    Asked by Ⓞ︎Ⓡ︎Ⓛ︎Ⓐ︎ on 28 Mar 2021.
    • Photo: Alan Diaz

      Alan Diaz answered on 17 Mar 2021:

      It depends on the type of software.
      If it’s a website you’re building, you’ll be checking for availability on the web, and that all the tags work.
      If it’s a piece of software to control a machine, you might be doing different procedures.
      There is a whole area within engineering dedicated just to “testing” whether software works or not, intuitively enough, it’s called “software testing” or “software quality assurance”. It is an actual job, with high demand for all companies doing any type of software.

    • Photo: Hui Wang

      Hui Wang answered on 17 Mar 2021:

      you could try some very simple codes to verify. for example, if the software is to simulate maths equations, you could try if 1+1=2.

    • Photo: Jun Lin

      Jun Lin answered on 18 Mar 2021:

      Just test it.

    • Photo: Peter Megyesi

      Peter Megyesi answered on 18 Mar 2021:

      That’s a brilliant question!

      I personally think you can never ABSOLUTELY be sure that it WORKS ALL THE TIME.
      There are always limitations. Maybe at a given time, under some circumstances etc. but the world and most importantly people just change too fast to be able to claim more than that.

      However, you can assure that your software works according to your or even more importantly to its users needs. And the key to that lies in testing indeed. Test early (some would even say before you write a small piece of your software you should write its tests first) and test constantly…

      If you’re interested in testing a very nice book I just came across introduces it through fantasy stories is this: https://www.dragonsout.com/

      And if you’re maybe considering learning some programming language, a great site that teaches you with a test-first mindset is this: http://exercism.io/

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