Software Testing Principles Checklist

Testing is as important an activity as development on your software project.  What's more, it is many times as complicated, with a near infinite number of possible combinations of conditions and many different kinds of results to validate.  Do you conduct unit testing, integration testing, system testing, regression testing, stress testing, acceptance testing...?  Do you know the difference between validation and destructive testing and are you employing the correct ratio of one to the other?  Do you know how to reduce your testing efforts to a manageable number of activities and when to stop testing?   Who should be testing your product and when in the development life cycle should they do it?  Here's a guideline to check your testing process and see if you are testing smart or just testing.