History

The separation of debugging from testing was initially introduced by Glenford J. Myers in 1979. Although his attention was on breakage testing ("a successful test is one that finds a bug") it illustrated the desire of the software engineering community to separate fundamental development activities, such as debugging, from that of verification. Dave Gelperin and William C. Hetzel classified in 1988 the phases and goals in software testing in the following stages:

• Until 1956 - Debugging oriented
• 1957–1978 - Demonstration oriented
• 1979–1982 - Destruction oriented
• 1983–1987 - Evaluation oriented
• 1988–2000 - Prevention oriented