Comment by tedggh

Looking at other domains where companies are developing complex products in highly regulated industries there’s one thing they all share in common, they invest a lot of capital in infrastructure for testing their designs. I spent years at a company trying to convince upper management in setting up a lab where we could simulate a production environment that would allow us to do a real integration test. It’s an idea hard to sell because testing is actually part of the budget in every project, so lack of testing couldn’t be attributed to our high rate of failures (going over budget fixing bugs during commissioning). Perhaps we should stop calling unit testing, testing so that we don’t confuse people. Until you we don’t put all the pieces together and do a proper stress test under close-to-realistic production conditions, our software cannot be considered tested. I think that’s the case for 99% of software companies.