Of course, there is risk in the opposite direction too. If a product goes too long without testing involvement, it can be difficult to undo a series of design decisions that reduce testability to the point that automation is too hard and resulting test tools too brittle.

The question a small test attempts to answer is, “Does this code do what it is supposed to do?”

Microsoft was another concern. But they also were very, very slow. They finally today have a product called SharePoint, which is somewhat similar to the ArsDigita Community System. One thing that we did which enabled us to be much, much faster than our competitors was that we developed on and released our software from running real-world systems. F

software is like a science. We show correctness by failing to prove incorrectness, despite our best efforts. Such proofs of incorrectness can be applied only to provable programs. A program that is not provable—due to unrestrained use of goto, for example—cannot be deemed correct no matter how many tests are applied to it.