First law: The pesticide paradox. Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffective.
If the objective of testing were to prove that a program is free of bugs, then not only would testing be practically impossible, but it would also be theoretically impossible.
Extra features were once considered desirable. We now recognize that ‘free’ features are rarely free. Any increase in generality that does not contribute to reliability, modularity, maintainability, and robustness should be suspected.
Software never was perfect and won’t get perfect. But is that a license to create garbage? The missing ingredient is our reluctance to quantify quality.
