Testing is important because software errors can have serious consequences like customer bank balances being inflated by $763 billion or radiation therapy machines overexposing patients. Testing helps verify that software meets its specifications and functions as intended. There are two main types of testing: static testing which analyzes source code without running programs, and dynamic testing which executes programs to look for errors. It is difficult to exhaustively test all possible inputs for non-trivial programs, so test cases must strategically sample a small percentage of inputs to uncover many defects. Both black box and white box testing methods aim to design effective test cases.