Effective design and coding practices help you create quality programs and should be followed by thorough testing of those programs. You should give adequate attention to the testing phase of development so that:
The process of testing usually uncovers bugs, a generic term that encompasses anything that your program does that you did not expect it to do. The process of removing these bugs from your program is called debugging.
While this chapter does not attempt to provide an exhaustive coverage of testing and debugging, it does provide useful tips and techniques to help you produce top-quality, error-free PL/I programs. Both general and PL/I-specific testing and debugging information follow.