Software testing history

Usage of the term "bug" to describe a defect has been a part of engineering jargon for many decades, perhaps even from the times of Tomas Edison. In software testing it always refers to September 9th, 1945, when the first real bug traced an error in the Harvard Mark II, an electromechanical computer. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book (see picture: Google: The First "Computer Bug" ). This history is usually connected with the name Grace Murray Hopper, who described this event in the computer log.

Let us start the history of testing from the 50s, when the first modern programming language was designed: FORTRAN, the "FORmula TRANslator", invented by John W. Backus, and the first FORTRAN compiler was delivered in April 1957.

The history of computers starts form Analytical Engine created in 1842 by Charles Babbage enlisted the help of Lady Ada Lovelace as a translator. Ada, called herself 'an Analyst'
Charles Babbage, (1791 – 1871) was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer [Wiki]

1950 - 1960     1960 - 1970      1970 - 1980     1980 - 1990      1990 - 2000     2000 - 2010

1. 1953 Dr Edward Deming published: Management’s responsibility for the Use of Statistical Techniques in Industry. He outlined 14 quality principles in this book.
2. 1954 - The first truly mass-produced computer IBM 650 was marketed.
3. 1955 - Grace Hopper created Flow-matic, the first high-level language.
4. 1955 the first computer user group, called SHARE was formed.
5. Until 1957 it was the debugging oriented period, when there was no clear difference between testing and debugging.

[History Software Testing Back to Top]

1. 1960 - Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) marketed the PDP-1,considered the first commercial minicomputer
2. 1960 - Block structure for better organization of code in the programs was introduced in Algol.
3. January 1, 1961 Computer Programming Fundamentals,Mcgraw-hill Inc; 1 edition by Herbert Leeds and Jerry Weinberg, describes software testing.
4. 1962 The first computer science departments established at Purdue and Stanford.
5. 1962 Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse. (The keyboard was first invented and patented in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes.)
6. 1963 Adam, Carl – wrote his dissertation with topic: Petri Nets.
7. 1964 The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) officially adopted the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character code.
8. 1966 Book:"Computer Programming Fundamentals" by Herbert D. Leeds and Gerald M. Weinberg
9. 1967 Herm Schiller creates the first software code coverage monitor, called Memmap, at IBM Poughkeepsie. It supports 360/370 Assembler language. [Richard Bender] - the source of that credit made a mistake.

   Phillip Carroll came up with the MEMMAP idea while working for Bill Cammack, after previously working at Product Test Lab in Pok. He was working in PTL while System 360 was being developed and during that time he wrote a primitive OS for it before any hardware was available. (Testing had to be done on a 360 simulator that ran on a PTL 7090.) The little OS he wrote was used to run primitive hardware test programs written in assembler. (It was used in PTL and on the manufacturing floor in Poughkeepsie for years.)

   As a result of that work, he understood 360 hardware design at a very deep level. In particular, he was very familiar with hardware branch interrupt logic. Shortly after joining Cammack's shop in the DPD lab some years later, he came up with the idea of capturing an execution map by trapping branches and modified an IBM 360 assembler to trace code execution, using the branch map. Thus: MEMMAP. [Phillip Carroll Tucson AZ]

10. 1968 The first introduction of the term software engineering and structured programming.
11. 1969 Edgar F. Codd introduced the concept of the relational system.
12. 1969 The first automatic teller machine (ATM) was put in service.
13. 1969 Definition of testing: "Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs " by Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930 -2002) Source: J.N. Buxton and B. Randell, eds, Software Engineering Techniques, April 1970, p. 16. Report on a conference sponsored by the NATO Science Committee, Rome, Italy, 27–31 October 1969
14. 1969 Richard Bender and Earl Pottorff created the first static and dynamic analysis tools using data flow analysis for improved test coverage. It increases code based coverage by 25% over the statement and branch coverage criteria in Memmap. (search for article called "How Do You Know When You Are Done Testing" that addresses this.) Note: this work was given the first Outstanding Invention Award ever handed out by IBM for breakthroughs in software engineering.

[History Software Testing Back to Top]

1. 1971 -The IEEE Computer Society was founded.
2. 1971 Milt Bryce first applied the term "methodology" to systems development.
3. 1972 Alan Kay developed Smalltalk the first object-oriented programming language.
4. 1972 Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan developed C language.
5. 1973 The first instance of a computer program that printed "Hello, World" occurred.
6. 1973 The first computer user groups was founded in Boston.(disbanded in 1996)
7. 1973 ( or 1970?) Elmendorf, William R. introduced cause – effect graphs in functional testing.Elmendorf is also the person who first created equivalence class testing with boundary analysis.
8. 1973 Gruenberger, F., introduced the triangle testing problem in his article: Program testing, the historical perspective.
9. 1974, 5 April first software related standard: "MIL-S-52779 Software Quality Program Requirements" was issued.
10. 1974 The first international computer chess tournament is won by the Russian KAISSA program.
11. 1975 November Hamlet, R.G., Compiler-based Systematic Testing.
12. 1976 Software reliability : principles and practices by Glenford J. Myers

    "The goal of the testers is to make the program fail. If his test case makes the program or system fail, then he is successful; if his test case does not make the program fail, then he is unsuccessful."
    "A good test case is a test case that has a high probability of detecting an undiscovered error, not a test case that show that the program works correctly." - Glenford Myers.

13. 1976 Fagan, Michael E, published his article " Design and Code Inspections to reduce errors in program development." IBM System Journal Vol. 15, No.3, 1976 pp.182-211. (developed Code Inspection process)
14. 1976 December - The cyclomatic complexity metric for measure complexity of a routine, originally described by Tom McCabe.
15. 1977 Atari 2600 a video game console was released.
16. 1977 Requirements Based Testing was introduced.
17. 1978 CompuServe pioneered the wide use of e-mail.
18. 1978 Hayes developed the Smartmodem for the first personal computers, it took the market in 1981.
19. 1979 Philip Crosby,published his book "Quality is free" in McGraw-Hill Publishing.
20. 1979. - The separation of debugging from testing was initially introduced by Glenford J. Myers In his book "The Art of Software Testing" he provided definition of software testing widely used now and the first clear explanation of equivalence classes, boundaries and other testing principles .

[History Software Testing Back to Top]

1. 1980 Epson MX-80 became the best-selling dot-matrix printer.
2. 1982 William Edwards Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 (quality principles) Points for Management.
3. 1983 Boris Beizer, "Software Testing Techniques" 1st edition.
4. 1983 Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet for DOS was released.
5. 1984 Tetris game was created.
6. 1985, July Commodore finally released the Amiga 1000 personal computer at a retail price of $1295
7. 1985 Excel spreadsheet application launched in by the Microsoft Corporation.Excel in the best friend of a tester.
8. 1986 Apple Macintosh Plus with 1MB of RAM was introduced.
9. 1986 - The particulars of the Six Sigma methodology were first formulated by Bill Smith at Motorola
10. 1987 ISO 9000 quality standards were released.
11. 1987 The Zachman Framework for descriptive represntations of an enterprise IT environment.
12. 1988 Eudora was the first non-mainframe e-mail client.
13. 1988 B. W. Boehm introduced a spiral model for software development.
14. 1988 ISO/IEC 12207- "Software Life Cycle Processes" was proposed and published in August 1995.
15. 1988 Dave Gelperin and William C. Hetzel classified the phases and goals in software testing.
16. 1989 WordPerfect Corporation released the WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.

[History Software Testing Back to Top]

1. In the early 1990s, continuous quality improvement (CQI) methods were implemented.
2. From early 1990's Bug Tracking and Version Control tools become popular.
3. 1991, June - publication of ISO 9000-3: "Quality management and quality assurance standards"
   Part 3: Guidelines for the application of ISO 9001 to the development, supply and maintenance of software.
4. 1991- Linus Torvalds wrote his own unix kernel for the popular now Linux operating system.
5. 1992, October, IBM introduced the first ThinkPad model 700.
6. 1993 Software Quality Automation, Inc., Woburn, Mass., has unveiled SQA TeamTest, a GUI testing tool implemented on a team/workgroup model.
   Rational purchased SQA TeamTest v6.1
   IBM acquired Rational corporation on December 2002.
7. 1993 HP LaserJet 4L was introduced.
8. 1993 Mosley, Daniel J., introduced Decision table method
9. 1994, October 13, Marc Andreessen launched Web browser called Mosaic Netscape 0.9.
10. 1994, 5 December DoD issued MIL-STD-498, software Development and Documentation.
11. 1995, July - Microsoft released the Windows 95 operating system.
12. 1997 UML (Unified Modeling Language) was introduced by James Rumbaugh,Grady Booch and Ivar Jacobson.
13. 1998 Rational unified process (RUP) was introduced.
14. 1998 K. Zambelich published article “Totally Data-Driven Automated Testing“
15. 1999, May How (and how not) to implement Data Driven Automation using Rational Robot , by Carl Nagle SAS Institute, Inc
    see details on http://safsdev.sourceforge.net/DataDrivenCompilation.html
16. 1999 -Poston, Robert developed a specification-based test generation tool

[History Software Testing Back to Top]

1. 2000, March First Keyword Driven Automation was implemented using Rational Robot
   See details on http://safsdev.sourceforge.net/DataDrivenTestAutomationFrameworks.htm#KeywordDrivenAutomationFrameworkModel
2. Rational Unified Process (RUP) Methodology (Develop iteratively, with risk as the primary iteration driver)

[History Software Testing Back to Top]

1. "A Complexity Measure." by McCabe, Tom. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, SE-2, no. 4 (December 1976)
2. The Art of Software Testing by Glenford J. Myers 1979
3. Software testing techniques by Boris Beizer, 1990
4. Automating Specification-Based Software Testing. by Poston, Robert M. USA: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1996.
5. Software Testing Techniques Technology Maturation and Research Strategy Class Report for 17-939A by Lu Luo Carnegie Mellon University
6. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF COMPUTER SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY by Harry Henderson
7. Handbook of Software Quality Assurance by G. Gordon Schulmeyer (second edition), 1998
8. Software Testing: A Craftsman's Approach, Second Edition by Paul Jorgensen, 2002

On this page I put some information about Software testing history for QA and testers. You can find more information related Software testing history searching the WEB.END Software testing history.