'More than the act of testing, the act of designing tests is one of the best bug preventers known. Bryn Mawr Psychology Graduate Program on this page. The thinking that must be done to create a useful test can discover and eliminate bugs before they are coded - indeed, test-design thinking can discover and eliminate bugs at every stage in the creation of software, from conception to specification, to design, coding and the rest. ' - - Software Testing Techniques, Creating a Software Engineering Culture by Karl Eugene Wiegers, ISBN:, Page: 211. 'Forget that lone hacker image if you still cherish it.

And if contemporary software engineering with its procedural structure bothers you, if you're blind to the opportunities for expressing your personal creativity within its necessary constraints, if the fast-tight algorithm is still the driving force in your designs - then get out! Find another domain, such as an R&D sandbox or an unreconstructed software shop, in which to play at programming. ' - - Chapter 11: Implementation, Section 3.2.2., Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer, ISBN. 'The most common kind of coding bug, and often considered the least harmful, are documentation bugs (i.e., erroneous comments).

Although many documentation bugs are simple spelling errors or the result of poor writing, many are actual errors - that is, misleading or erroneous comments. We can no longer afford to discount such bugs, because their consequences are as great as 'true' coding errors. Today programming labor is dominated by maintenance.