Test-Case Quality : Understanding Practitioners’ Perspectives

• Background: Test-case quality has always been one of the major concerns in software testing. To improve test-case quality, it is important to better understand how practitioners perceive the quality of test-cases. Objective: Motivated by that need, we investigated how practitioners define test-case quality and which aspects of test-cases are important for quality assessment. Method: We conducted semi-structured interviews with professional developers, testers and test architects from a multinational software company in Sweden. Before the interviews, we asked participants for actual test cases (written in natural language) that they perceive as good, normal, and bad respectively together with rationales for their assessment. We also compared their opinions on shared test cases and contrasted their views with the relevant literature. Results: We present a quality model which consists of 11 test-case quality attributes. We also identify a misalignment in defining test-case quality among practitioners and between academia and industry, along with suggestions for improving test-case quality in industry. Conclusion: The results show that practitioners’ background, including roles and working experience, are critical dimensions of how test-case quality is defined and assessed. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Programvaruteknik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Software Engineering (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Natural-language test case

Software testing

Test-case quality

Process engineering

Quality management

Testing

Critical dimension

Natural languages

Quality assessment

Quality attributes

Quality modeling

Semi structured interviews

Software company

Test case

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)