软件测试原理与实践第二版英文翻译（一）

特别声明：该英文翻译仅供参考，只适用于个人学习

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1     The Software Industry

The software industry has come a long way since its beginnings in the 1950's. The independent software industry Was essentially born in 1969 when IBM announced that they would stop treating their software as a free add-on to its computers, and instead would sell software and hardware as separate products. This opened up the market to external companies that could produce and sell software for IBM machines.

自20世纪50年代开始以来，软件行业已经走过了漫长的道路。1969年，IBM宣布他们将不再把自己的软件作为电脑的免费附加组件，而是将软件和硬件作为单独的产品销售，从此独立软件行业就诞生了。这为IBM机器生产和销售软件的外部公司打开了市场。

Software products for mass consumption arrived in 1981 with the arrival of PC-based software packages. Another dramatic boost came in the 1990's with the arrival of the World Wide Web, and in the 2000's with mobile devices. In 2010 the Top 500 companies in the global software industry had revenues of $492 billion. The industry is extremely dynamic and continually undergoing rapid change as new innovations appear. Unlike some other industries, for example transportation, it is still in many ways an immature industry. It does not, in general, have a set of quality standards that have been gained through years of hard-won experience.

1981年，随着基于pc的软件包出现，面向大众消费的软件产品出现了。另一个戏剧性的增长出现在20世纪90年代万维网的出现，以及21世纪初移动设备的出现。2010年，全球软件业500强公司的收入达到4920亿美元。随着创新的出现，这个行业非常有活力，不断经历着快速的变化。与运输等其他行业不同，它在许多方面仍是一个不成熟的行业。总的来说，它没有一套通过多年来的经验而获得的质量标准。

Numerous examples exist of the results of failures in software quality and the costs it can incur. Famous incidents include the failure of the European Space Agency's Ariane 5 rocket, the Therac -25 radiation therapy machine, and the loss of the Mars Climate observer in 1999. A study by the US Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2002 estimated that the cost of faulty software to the US economy was up to $59.5 billion per year.

存在许多软件质量失败的结果及其可能产生的成本的例子。著名的事件包括欧洲航天局的阿丽亚娜5号火箭、Therac-25辐射治疗机的故障，以及1999年失去火星气候观测员。美国商务部国家标准与技术研究所2002年的一项研究估计，故障软件每年给美国经济造成的损失高达595亿美元。

However, many participants in the industry do apply quality models and measures to the processes through which their software is produced. Software Testing is an important part of the Software Quality assurance process, and is an important discipline within Software Engineering. It has an important role to play throughout the software development lifecycle, whether being used in a Verification and Validation context, or as part of an actual test-driven software development process such as Extreme programming.

然而，该行业的许多参与者确实将质量模型和度量应用于他们的软件生产过程。软件测试是软件质量保证过程的重要组成部分，是软件工程中的一个重要学科。它在整个软件中扮演着重要的角色开发生命周期，无论是在验证和确认上下文中使用，还是作为实际测试驱动的软件开发过程（如极限编程）的一部分。

Software Engineering as a discipline grew out of the“Software Crisis". The term Software Crisis was first used at the end of the 1960's but it really began to have meaning through the 1970's as the software industry was growing. This rflected the incressing size and complexity of software projets combined with the lack of formal procedures for managing such projects.

软件工程作为一门学科源于“软件危机”。软件危机一词最早出现在20世纪60年代末，但随着软件行业的发展，它在20世纪70年代才真正有了意义。这反映了软件项目的规模和复杂性不断增加，加上缺乏管理此类项目的正式程序。