Practitioners' views on good software testing practices

Software testing is an integral part of software development process. Unfortunately, for many projects, bugs are prevalent despite testing effort, and testing continues to cost significant amount of time and resources. This brings forward the issue of test case quality and prompts us to investigate...

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Main Authors: KOCHHAR, Pavneet S., XIA, Xin, LO, David
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4479
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5482/viewcontent/icse194.pdf
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spelling sg-smu-ink.sis_research-54822019-12-19T07:04:05Z Practitioners' views on good software testing practices KOCHHAR, Pavneet S. XIA, Xin LO, David Software testing is an integral part of software development process. Unfortunately, for many projects, bugs are prevalent despite testing effort, and testing continues to cost significant amount of time and resources. This brings forward the issue of test case quality and prompts us to investigate what make good test cases. To answer this important question, we interview 21 and survey 261 practitioners, who come from many small to large companies and open source projects distributed in 27 countries, to create and validate 29 hypotheses that describe characteristics of good test cases and testing practices. These characteristics span multiple dimensions including test case contents, size and complexity, coverage, maintainability, and bug detection. We present highly rated characteristics and rationales why practitioners agree or disagree with them, which in turn highlight best practices and trade-offs that need to be considered in the creation of test cases. Our findings also highlight open problems and opportunities for software engineering researchers to improve practitioner activities and address their pain points. 2019-05-01T07:00:00Z text application/pdf https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4479 info:doi/10.1109/ICSE-SEIP.2019.00015 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5482/viewcontent/icse194.pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems eng Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Software Engineering
institution Singapore Management University
building SMU Libraries
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider SMU Libraries
collection InK@SMU
language English
topic Software Engineering
spellingShingle Software Engineering
KOCHHAR, Pavneet S.
XIA, Xin
LO, David
Practitioners' views on good software testing practices
description Software testing is an integral part of software development process. Unfortunately, for many projects, bugs are prevalent despite testing effort, and testing continues to cost significant amount of time and resources. This brings forward the issue of test case quality and prompts us to investigate what make good test cases. To answer this important question, we interview 21 and survey 261 practitioners, who come from many small to large companies and open source projects distributed in 27 countries, to create and validate 29 hypotheses that describe characteristics of good test cases and testing practices. These characteristics span multiple dimensions including test case contents, size and complexity, coverage, maintainability, and bug detection. We present highly rated characteristics and rationales why practitioners agree or disagree with them, which in turn highlight best practices and trade-offs that need to be considered in the creation of test cases. Our findings also highlight open problems and opportunities for software engineering researchers to improve practitioner activities and address their pain points.
format text
author KOCHHAR, Pavneet S.
XIA, Xin
LO, David
author_facet KOCHHAR, Pavneet S.
XIA, Xin
LO, David
author_sort KOCHHAR, Pavneet S.
title Practitioners' views on good software testing practices
title_short Practitioners' views on good software testing practices
title_full Practitioners' views on good software testing practices
title_fullStr Practitioners' views on good software testing practices
title_full_unstemmed Practitioners' views on good software testing practices
title_sort practitioners' views on good software testing practices
publisher Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
publishDate 2019
url https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4479
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5482/viewcontent/icse194.pdf
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