Esteemed folks of Daniweb, I find myself in a small quandry. I am part of a test organization working to test a piece of software that the developer does not feel needs the level of test we provide. My issue is this: As we all know, if you change code and have to recompile, your changes can unintentionally affect other areas of code. Can someone provide me with a technical or scholarly references that cover this phenomenom? Thanks for any responses you can manage.

Why would you need a reference book for that?? It's happened to me hundreds of time, which is why desk checking and other in-house checking is required. At my last job they had an entire team doing nothing but testing the software that the programmer's wrote and/or modified. Ever hear of "beta testing"?? The intent is for the general public to test out the program, find bugs, and report back to the software company. The people at Blizzard Inc. do that all the time with their games and Microsoft does it occasionally too with some of thier products.

Probably any book about software development will have a few sentences about product testing before release. The subject isn't complicated enough to require more than one or two sentences.

the developer does not feel needs the level of test we provide

Quite possibly he has not been writing code very long, or maybe the program just isn't all that complicated.

The Complete Guide to SOFTWARE TESTING, 2nd edition, by Bill Hetzel devotes a chapter (11 pages) to testing software changes. It has some relevant comments that may be worth a look.

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