A preliminary survey on software testing practices in Australia

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of, to the best of our knowledge, the first survey on software testing practices carried out in Australian ICT industry. A total of 65 organizations from various major capital cities in Australia participated in the survey, which was conducted between 2002 and 2003. The survey focused on five major aspects of software testing, namely testing methodologies and techniques, automated testing tools, software testing metrics, testing standards, and software testing training and education. Based on the survey results, current practices in software testing are reported, as well as some observations and recommendations for the future of software testing in Australia for industry and academia.

Software Test Automation in Practice: Empirical Observations

“…Besides our prior industry-wide research in testing [4,5,[12][13][14], software testing practices and test process improvement have also been studied by others, like Ng et al [16] in Australia. Their study applied the survey method to establish knowledge on such topics as testing methodologies, tools, metrics, standards, training and education.…”

Experiences in Software Testing Education: Some Observations from an International Cooperation

“…• More survey results on the diversity of international industry practice in software testing would be very informative [18], [20], and [21].…”

Reduction of Test Suites Using Mutation

“…Often, testing is performed in an artisanal way, and the efforts carried out in the last years to obtain test automation mostly consist of the application of unit testing frameworks, such as JUnit or NUnit. As a matter of fact, the work by Ng et al [26] shows the best results on test automation: 79.5% of surveyed organizations automate test execution and 75% regression testing. However, only 38 of the 65 organizations (58.5%) use test metrics, with defect count being the most popular (31 organizations).…”