Message from the Corporate Director, IBM Software Test

How do you know that the product is going to work? How do you know it is ready 
to ship? How do you know it will meet expectations? The answer is "verification 
of committed requirements," better known as testing.

Testing has become extremely important to both our business and our customers. 
Solutions are more complex—-interconnecting more and more intricate technologies 
across multiple operating environments. With the increasing business demand for 
more software coupled with the advent of newer, more productive languages and 
tools, more code is being produced in very short periods of time. Software 
vendors typically spend 25 to 50 percent of their total product development 
budget on testing. Customers are expecting solutions that work the first time, 
every time, because outages are more visible and costly. No business wants an 
outage to make the front page of the morning newspaper. Testing has expanded to 
the point that a rapidly growing testing services market has emerged.

In IBM, we have formed a company-wide test community to facilitate sharing, 
teaming, and improving testing methodology. Testing is recognized as a 
long-term career for software engineers. Under this community-wide focus, 
advanced test practices and associated tools have been designed and are being 
developed and aggressively deployed. These have yielded over a thousand 
improvements in testing organizations across IBM—-ranging from automation of 
existing tasks to fundamental advances in testing technology. Another benefit 
of this focus is a much closer partnership between developers and testers in 
jointly delivering higher quality solutions.

With such an emphasis on testing in the industry and within IBM, innovation has 
been a natural result. The papers in this special issue of the IBM Systems 
Journal provide a glimpse into some of the advancements being made. As 
recognized experts and practitioners in the industry, the contributing authors 
provide a set of insightful papers derived from their research and experiences 
in testing and verification. Many more advances will be needed as testing 
continues to increase in importance in the 21st century-—ensuring that customer 
expectations will be met.

Bill Woodworth