Time-boxed Software Testing

A primary problem faced by testers relates to time available to do testing. There is never enough time to do all the testing that may be possible to perform. Testing always involves a trade-off, making choices on what and how much to test within the constraints of available time. Look at it this way – if we were to measure test coverage as a percentage of all the tests that may be potentially performed, the test coverage would always be zero. This is due to the fact that for a significant real-world system, the number of tests that may be run are infinite.