Software Debugging, Testing, and Verification

In the commercial software development organizations, increased complexity of products, shortened development cycles and higher customer expectations of quality have placed a major responsibility on the areas of software debugging, testing, and verification. As this issue of the IBM Systems Journal illustrates, the technology is improving on all the three fronts. However, we observe that due to the informal nature of software development as a whole, the prevalent practices in the industry are still quite immature even in areas where there is existing technology. In addition, the technology and tools in the more advanced aspects are really not ready for a large scale commercial use.