CHAPTER 15 TOOLS TECHNIQUES FOR TESTING DEBUGGING AND OPTIMIZATION Testing: After you write your program, you

will need to test it for bugs. Once the testing process convinces you that there are bugs lurking, you will need to find them and eradicate them.

How to test a program? Testing programs is the first step in the debugging process, because you cannot correct errors until you determine that errors exist. Some peoples ideas of testing a program consist of running the program a few times to see what happens, each time using slightly different input. This process can succeed when you have a short program, but its not effective for a long program or even a short program that is in any way subtle. In any case, even for the simplest programs, the choice of test data is all important. A good testing suite is vital because you must test all possible