Lee Copeland is an internationally known consultant in the area of software testing with over thirty years experience as an information systems professional. He has held a number of technical and managerial positions with commercial and non-profit organizations in the areas of software development, testing, and process improvement. He has taught seminars and consulted extensively throughout the United States and internationally.

As a consultant for Software Quality Engineering, Lee travels the world promoting effective software testing to his clients. In addition, he is the Program Chair for STAREast and STARWest, the world's premier conferences on software testing (although EuroStar is a close second).

A little boy comes home from school and his mother asks, What did you learn in school today? The boy responds, "Today we learned how to spell banana but we didn't learn when to stop". As testers we face that same problem. We know how to do effective testing. But how do we know when to stop? How do we know we have done enough testing?

In this presentation, Lee discusses the five most common stopping criteria - (1) testing has met previously defined coverage goals, (2) the defect discovery rate drops below a previously defined threshold, (3) the marginal cost of finding the next defect exceeds the expected loss from that defect, (4) the project team reaches consensus on product release, and (5) the boss says Ship It!

In addition, Lee analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of each of these criteria.

David Lorge Parnas is professor of Software Engineering, SFI Fellow and Director of the Software Quality Research Laboratory at the University of Limerick. Professor Parnas received his B.S., M.S. and PhD. In Electrical Engineering - Systems & Communications Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University and honorary doctorates from the EHT in Zurich and the catholic University of Louvain.

Professor Parnas won an AMC Best Paper Award in 1979, and two Most Influential Paper awards from the International Conference on Software Engineering, the 1998 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award , the Practical Visionary Award given in honour of late Dr. Harlan Mills, and the Componant and Object Technology Award presented at TOOLS99. He was the first winner of the Norbert Wiener Prize from Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility and recently won the FifF prize from Forum Informatiker Fuer Frieden und Verantwortung in Germany.

Dr. Parnas is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and is licensed as a Professional Engineer in Ontario.

Testing is sometimes viewed as an "add on" step in software development - something you do to demonstrate that the product is ready for use. Test planning is often postponed until the development is near its end. This results in incomplete testing, ambiguous test results, and the release of products of doubtful quality.

After reviewing fundamental software testing issues, we describe a document-driven testing approach in which test plans and test result evaluation are done with the aid of documentation prepared throughout the design process. The policies about testing, and response to test results are determined in advance and high quality standards can be enforced on a project.

These slides, and others from the SQRL lecture series, are available at the University of Limerick Department of Computer Science and Information Systems (CSIS) :
http://www.csis.ul.ie/Research/ParnasLectures
Requirements Documentation: A Systematic Approach
Decomposition of Software Into Components
A Procedure for Interface Design
Design through Documentation: The Path to Software Quality Software Inspections We Can Trust
Documentation Based Software Testing