Finding Those Hidden Bugs

One area of testing that often gets neglected are the various ways that bugs can be ferreted out by considering how they “hide.” Testing an application is sometimes like walking a mine field, where you have to trigger the mines in order to see where they are hidden. Another analogy might be a virus hunter, who has to find signs of an outbreak by testing the population, some of whom are hiding to cover up the fact that they have a virus. Here I want to present some information about why testers (and developers!) should consider a technique known as hidden-fault analysis and, more importantly, show how the notion of hidden faults can skew test results.

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