"An Early Start to Testing" (c. 1980) is a DeMarco paper or report on early testing practices in software development. It belongs to the structured-methods-era period of DeMarco's career when he was contributing to the systematic codification of software engineering practice through the yourdon-inc network and related practitioner channels.
The economic argument for early testing investment — that defect costs grow exponentially with time from introduction to discovery, making front-loaded quality activity more cost-effective than back-loaded testing — is a theme that appears in why-does-software-cost-so-much and connects to the empirical orientation of controlling-software-projects. This paper likely represents an early articulation of that argument in the context of the structured methods community's attention to quality and verification.
Further bibliographic and content details are to be confirmed. This entry is a stub pending research into the paper's original publication venue and contents.