As software systems are becoming more pervasive, they are also becoming more susceptible to failures, resulting in potentially lethal combinations. Software testing is critical to preventing software failures but is, arguably, the least understood part of the software life cycle and the toughest to perform correctly. Adequate research has been carried out in both the process and technology dimensions of testing, but not in the human dimensions. This paper attempts to fill in the gap by exploring the human dimension, i.e., trying to understand the motivation of software professionals to take up and sustain testing careers. Towards that end, a survey was conducted in four countries - India, Canada, Cuba, and China - to try to understand how professional software testers perceive and value work-related factors that could influence their motivation to take up and sustain testing careers. With a sample of 220 software professionals, we observed that very few professionals are keen to take up testing careers. Some aspects of software testing, such as the learning opportunities, appear to be a common motivator across the four countries; whereas the treatment meted out to testers as second-class citizens and the complexity of the job appeared to be the most important de-motivators. This comparative study offers useful insights that can help global software industry leaders to come up with an action plan to put the software testing profession under a new light. That could increase the number of software engineers choosing testing careers, which would facilitate quality testing.
The teaching-learning process may require specific pedagogical approaches to establish a relationship with industry practices. Recently, some studies investigated the educators' perspectives and the undergraduate courses curriculum to identify potential weaknesses and solutions for the software testing teaching process. However, it is still unclear how the practitioners evaluate the acquisition of knowledge about software testing in undergraduate courses. This study carried out an expert survey with 68 newly graduated practitioners to determine what the industry expects from them and what they…
ISTQB Certifications Under the Lens: Their Contributions to the Software-Testing Profession; and AI-assisted Synthesis of Practitioners' Endorsements and Criticisms
Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学）；Testinium A.Ş.（Testinium股份有限公司）；Q Investment Bank（Q投资银行）；Azerbaijan Technical University（阿塞拜疆理工大学）
Context: Microservices Architecture (MSA) has received significant attention in the software industry. However, little empirical evidence exists on design, monitoring, and testing of microservices systems. Objective: This research aims to gain a deep understanding of how microservices systems are designed, monitored, and tested in the industry. Method: A mixed-methods study was conducted with 106 survey responses and 6 interviews from microservices practitioners. Results: The main findings are: (1) a combination of domain-driven design and business capability is the most used strategy to decom…
During exploratory testing sessions the tester simultaneously learns, designs and executes tests. The activity is iterative and utilizes the skills of the tester and provides flexibility and creativity.Test charters are used as a vehicle to support the testers during the testing. The aim of this study is to support practitioners in the design of test charters through checklists. We aimed to identify factors allowing practitioners to critically reflect on their designs and contents of test charters to support practitioners in making informed decisions of what to include in test charters. The fa…
Unit testing has been considered as having a key role in building high quality software, and therefore it has been widely used in practice. However, data on the relationship between unit testing and aspects of software quality remain scarce. A survey study with 235 survey responses from seven organizations was conducted in order to understand the correlation between practitioners' perception of code quality and unit testing practices. In addition, we conducted a case study in one of these organizations to investigate the correlation between unit test coverage and post-unit test defects. In bot…
Although testing is critical in GSD, its application in this context has not been deeply investigated so far. This work investigates testing in GSD. It provides support for test managers acting in a globally distributed environment. With this it closes a gap. The leading question is "What problems exist in testing in GSD and how can they be addressed in projects?" Decomposing this question we a) identify problems of testing in GSD projects and b) provide good practices to support practitioners in testing in GSD projects. The research is realized in the context of Capgemini Germany. Our contrib…
Background: The artifacts used in Agile software testing and the reasons why these artifacts are used are fairly well-understood. However, empirical research on how Agile test artifacts are eventually designed in practice and which quality factors make them useful for software testing remains sparse. Aims: Our objective is two-fold. First, we identify current challenges in using test artifacts to understand why certain quality factors are considered good or bad. Second, we build an Activity-Based Artifact Quality Model that describes what Agile test artifacts should look like. Method: We condu…
Test flakiness forms a major testing concern. Flaky tests manifest non-deterministic outcomes that cripple continuous integration and lead developers to investigate false alerts. Industrial reports indicate that on a large scale, the accrual of flaky tests breaks the trust in test suites and entails significant computational cost. To alleviate this, practitioners are constrained to identify flaky tests and investigate their impact. To shed light on such mitigation mechanisms, we interview 14 practitioners with the aim to identify (i) the sources of flakiness within the testing ecosystem, (ii) …
Over the last several decades, computer games started to have a significant impact on society. However, although a computer game is a type of software, the process to conceptualize, produce and deliver a game could involve unusual features. In software testing, for instance, studies demonstrated the hesitance of professionals to use automated testing techniques with games, due to the constant changes in requirements and design, and pointed out the need for creating testing tools that take into account the flexibility required for the game development process. Goal. This study aims to improve t…
As researchers, we already understand how to make testing more effective and efficient at finding bugs. However, as fuzzing (i.e., automated testing) becomes more widely adopted in practice, practitioners are asking: Which assurances does a fuzzing campaign provide that exposes no bugs? When is it safe to stop the fuzzer with a reasonable residual risk? How much longer should the fuzzer be run to achieve sufficient coverage? It is time for us to move beyond the innovation of increasingly sophisticated testing techniques, to build a body of knowledge around the explication and quantification of…
Autonomous driving has shown great potential to reform modern transportation. Yet its reliability and safety have drawn a lot of attention and concerns. Compared with traditional software systems, autonomous driving systems (ADSs) often use deep neural networks in tandem with logic-based modules. This new paradigm poses unique challenges for software testing. Despite the recent development of new ADS testing techniques, it is not clear to what extent those techniques have addressed the needs of ADS practitioners. To fill this gap, we present the first comprehensive study to identify the curren…
Enabling fully automated testing of mobile applications has recently become an important topic of study for both researchers and practitioners. A plethora of tools and approaches have been proposed to aid mobile developers both by augmenting manual testing practices and by automating various parts of the testing process. However, current approaches for automated testing fall short in convincing developers about their benefits, leading to a majority of mobile testing being performed manually. With the goal of helping researchers and practitioners - who design approaches supporting mobile testin…
Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学）；University of Innsbruck（因斯布鲁克大学）；Blekinge Institute of Technology（布莱金厄理工学院）
Context: To reduce manual effort of extracting test cases from natural-language requirements, many approaches based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been proposed in the literature. Given the large amount of approaches in this area, and since many practitioners are eager to utilize such techniques, it is important to synthesize and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in this area. Objective: Our objective is to summarize the state-of-the-art in NLP-assisted software testing which could benefit practitioners to potentially utilize those NLP-based techniques. Moreover, this can …
DevSecOps is a software development paradigm that places a high emphasis on the culture of collaboration between developers (Dev), security (Sec) and operations (Ops) teams to deliver secure software continuously and rapidly. Adopting this paradigm effectively, therefore, requires an understanding of the challenges, best practices and available solutions for collaboration among these functional teams. However, collaborative aspects related to these teams have received very little empirical attention in the DevSecOps literature. Hence, we present a study focusing on a key security activity, App…
Testing of autonomous systems is extremely important as many of them are both safety-critical and security-critical. The architecture and mechanism of such systems are fundamentally different from traditional control software, which appears to operate in more structured environments and are explicitly instructed according to the system design and implementation. To gain a better understanding of autonomous systems practice and facilitate research on testing of such systems, we conducted an exploratory study by synthesizing academic literature with a focus group discussion and interviews with i…
Checking software application suitability using automated software tools has become a vital element for most organisations irrespective of whether they produce in-house software or simply customise off-the-shelf software applications for internal use. As software solutions become ever more complex, the industry becomes increasingly dependent on software automation tools, yet the brittle nature of the available software automation tools limits their effectiveness. Companies invest significantly in obtaining and implementing automation software but most of the tools fail to deliver when the cost…
A software release note is one of the essential documents in the software development life cycle. The software release contains a set of information, e.g., bug fixes and security fixes. Release notes are used in different phases, e.g., requirement engineering, software testing and release management. Different types of practitioners (e.g., project managers and clients) get benefited from the release notes to understand the overview of the latest release. As a result, several studies have been done about release notes production and usage in practice. However, two significant problems (e.g., du…
Context: Software testability is the degree to which a software system or a unit under test supports its own testing. To predict and improve software testability, a large number of techniques and metrics have been proposed by both practitioners and researchers in the last several decades. Reviewing and getting an overview of the entire state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice in this area is often challenging for a practitioner or a new researcher. Objective: Our objective is to summarize the body of knowledge in this area and to benefit the readers (both practitioners and researchers) in pr…
Context: Scientific software plays an important role in critical decision making, for example making weather predictions based on climate models, and computation of evidence for research publications. Recently, scientists have had to retract publications due to errors caused by software faults. Systematic testing can identify such faults in code. Objective: This study aims to identify specific challenges, proposed solutions, and unsolved problems faced when testing scientific software. Method: We conducted a systematic literature survey to identify and analyze relevant literature. We identifie…
Despite its importance, software testing is, arguably, the least understood part of the software life cycle and still the toughest to perform correctly. Many researchers and practitioners have been working to address the situation. However, most of the studies focus on the process and technology dimensions and only a few on the human dimension of testing, in spite of the reported relevance of human aspects of software testing. Testers need to understand various stakeholders explicit and implicit requirements, be aware of how developers work individually and in teams, and develop skills to repo…
The microservice software architecture is more scalable and efficient than its monolithic predecessor. Despite its increasing adoption, microservices might expose security concerns and issues that are distinct from those associated with monolithic designs. We propose Microusity, a tool that performs RESTful API testing on a specific type of microservice pattern called back end for front end (BFF). We design a novel approach to trace BFF requests using the port mapping between requests to BFF and the sub-requests sent to back-end microservices. Furthermore, our tool can pinpoint which of the ba…
Developing test code may be a time-consuming task that usually requires much effort and cost, especially when it is done manually. Besides, during this process, developers and testers are likely to adopt bad design choices, which may lead to the introduction of the so-called test smells in test code. Test smells are bad solutions to either implement or design test code. As the test code with test smells increases in size, these tests might become more complex, and as a consequence, much harder to understand and evolve correctly. Therefore, test smells may have a negative impact on the quality …
Accurately predicting faulty software units helps practitioners target faulty units and prioritize their efforts to maintain software quality. Prior studies use machine-learning models to detect faulty software code. We revisit past studies and point out potential improvements. Our new study proposes a revised benchmarking configuration. The configuration considers many new dimensions, such as class distribution sampling, evaluation metrics, and testing procedures. The new study also includes new datasets and models. Our findings suggest that predictive accuracy is generally good. However, pre…
Random testing (RT) is a black-box software testing technique that tests programs by generating random test inputs. It is a widely used technique for software quality assurance, but there has been much debate by practitioners concerning its failure-detection effectiveness. RT is argued to be possibly less effective by some researchers as it does not utilize any information about the program under test. Efforts to mainly improve the failure-detection capability of RT, have led to the proposition of Adaptive Random Testing (ART). ART takes advantage of the location information of previous non-fa…
Quantum computers are becoming more mainstream. As more programmers are starting to look at writing quantum programs, they need to test and debug their code. In this paper, we discuss various use-cases for quantum computers, either standalone or as part of a System of Systems. Based on these use-cases, we discuss some testing and debugging tactics that one can leverage to ensure the quality of the quantum software. We also highlight quantum-computer-specific issues and list novel techniques that are needed to address these issues. The practitioners can readily apply some of these tactics to th…
Search-Based Metamorphic Testing of Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Underwater Robotic Software
Simula Research Laboratory（Simula 研究实验室）；Oslo Metropolitan University（奥斯陆都市大学）；Mondragon University（蒙德拉贡大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立情报学研究所）；Group Research and Development, DNV AS（DNV AS 集团研发部）
Combinatorial testing has been suggested as an effective method of creating test cases at a lower cost. However, industrially applicable tools for modeling and combinatorial test generation are still scarce. As a direct effect, combinatorial testing has only seen a limited uptake in industry that calls into question its practical usefulness. This lack of evidence is especially troublesome if we consider the use of combinatorial test generation for industrial safety-critical control software, such as are found in trains, airplanes, and power plants. To study the industrial application of combin…
Search-Based Software Testing (SBST) is the application of optimization algorithms to problems in software testing. In previous work, we have implemented and evaluated Interactive Search-Based Software Testing (ISBST) tool prototypes, with a goal to successfully transfer the technique to industry. While SBSE solutions are often validated on benchmark problems, there is a need to validate them in an operational setting. The present paper discusses the development and deployment of SBST tools for use in industry and reflects on the transfer of these techniques to industry. In addition to previou…
