What makes up good test designs?
Validation, the confirmation that the software indeed provides the features that were specified, is not sufficient for testing. Software testing is more than validation. Indeed, it is important to do more than validate the software, and in some cases, even more important to attempt to break the software than validate it. For example, if you are releasing a limited-functionality demo version of your software for free distribution on the web, it is vastly more important to attempt to break the software to ensure that you cannot access the features reserved for the full version of the software than it is to confirm the existence of the features that are supposed to be there. Imagine the financial loss if you accidentally left the key functionality of your expensive software in the give-away version. Most testers spin their wheels doing validation, but that does not really improve the quality of the software. Quality control/validation is only a subset of testing. It is a different discipl
