A Look at 25 Years of Data

Is 25 years enough time to build up a coherent body of knowledge that can help point to useful principles? As a testbed for helping us answer this question, software testing techniques are a good place to start. Few software practices are as important as testing, and testing techniques are amenable to measurement and reasoning about their effectiveness. Because they´re aimed at removing faults, measuring the number and type of such removed faults seems like a natural part of applying these techniques. To make sense of this data, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid researchers have spent some time worrying about how to put 25 years´ worth of work together usefully.