Software Testing as a Social Science

Cem Kaner, Florida Institute of Technology

SPECIAL OCTOBER PRESENTATION
Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Dr. Kaner starts from Jerry Weinberg's definition of quality: "Quality is value to some person." Dr. Kaner then argues that testers are investigators, people who do empirical research (a.k.a. tests) to discover quality-related information about the product under test. He says, "Weinberg's definition highlights the subjectivity of quality: different stakeholders, different values, different quality. When we search for clues to better and more relevant testing in the needs, preferences, valuation and conflicts among stakeholders; in complaint patterns and market reactions to our previous products and our competitors'; when we use human performance measures as indicators of project status and product quality; when we use intuition or formal tools to find patterns in the overwhelming mass of conflicting information about the products we are testing; we are applying the social sciences, not programming."

Cem Kaner is acknowledged worldwide as one of the foremost thinkers on the subjects of software testing, education, and law. He is the senior author of two seminal works in the testing field, "Testing Computer Software" (with co-authors Hung Nguyen and Jack Falk, 1993) and "Lessons Learned in Software Testing" (with James Bach and Bret Pettichord, 2001). He is also the author (with David Pels) of "Bad Software: What To Do When Software Fails" (1998).

Dr. Kaner is currently a professor at Florida Institute of Technology, where he teaches and does research on software testing, software metrics, and computer law and ethics.

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