> comprehensive test suite, vs. having very careful software engineers, vs. having extremely thorough code reviews, vs. something else In practice, you need al

> comprehensive test suite, vs. having very careful software engineers, vs. having extremely thorough code reviews, vs. something else In practice, you need all, for various reasons. > in terms of the correctness of the final product What is there "correctness"? Ah, I see in your later post: > I'm only referring to the implementation being true to the language specification The answer is: even checking for that is not something which can put the humans out of the loop. But humans alone (as in "extremely thorough code reviews" or "very careful software engineers") are provably not enough as the "space" that has to be tested is too big to be useful without "a comprehensive test suite." Still I'm not aware that a complete "comprehensive test suite" which would be "enough" for any non-trivial language can exist. In my experience, non-trivial goals are simply bigger than any "simple" or "single" "solution." So in that sense, any project eventually fails due to the human factor. It's the humans that will use anything else as the tools to achieve the goal. It's the quality of humans that are in charge that is the precondition for everything else. So the answer is always: prioritize for having good people, anything else will be taken care of by them: they will maintain the tests, be careful, do the reviews etc. Don't expect you can "save" on something.