EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Cem Kaner
Organization : | N/A
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
General Comments
Comment : | In industry, software testing plays a large and expensive role in software development. For example, Microsoft allocates equal numbers of testers and programmers to its development projects. There is enormous incentive to find ways to make the testing process more effective (find more problems, and more of the severe problems, before inflicting them on customers) and more efficient (find them more cheaply). We have not solved this problem. New methods, new variations of old methods, and new applications of old methods are tried every day. Commercial and scientific testing is often done under loose reporting standards (including, no reporting requirements at all). For example, we might write programs to create and run sequences of millions of tests at a time. None of the individual tests in such a sequence is documented. No individual test is as carefully designed as you would see in the pool of a few thousand lovingly handcrafted, meticulously documented tests created by the independent test lab as part of a regulated verification and validation process. But the overwhelming hordes of cheap tests sometimes find problems that you couldn’t even afford to look for with the expensive tests. This is one example (sometimes called high-volume automated testing or accelerated stress testing) of the broader point—private individuals (working engineers and researchers) could extend the testing effort for voting systems enormously. Of course, we see these volunteer engineering efforts all the time. I am writing this document using OpenOffice Writer, a word processing program developed and tested primarily by volunteers and available for free to the public (http://www.openoffice.org). If word processors and operating systems (linux, apache) can attract so much skilled volunteer support, how much do you think we could get for voting systems?