A survey of software testing practices in Canada

Garousi, Vahid; Zhi, Junji

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2012.12.051

Cited by 134 publications

(114 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The responses from the free-text areas yielded over 25 k words of feedback. The approach to qualitative analysis of free-text responses was similar to that adopted by Garousi and Zhi-synthesis, aggregation and clustering of responses to identify key categories (Garousi and Zhi 2013).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other recent, but less closely related, software engineering surveys include the practices used in the Turkish software industry (Garousi et al 2015), the use of modelling in the Italian software industry (Torchiano et al 2013), the use of UML modelling for the design of embedded software in Brazil (Agner et al 2013), testing practices used in the Canadian software industry (Garousi and Zhi 2013), the data and analysis needs of developers and managers at Microsoft (Buse and Zimmermann 2012) and the use of software design models in practice, in particular UML (Gorschek et al 2014).…”

Section: Software Engineering Surveysmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Recognising object-oriented software design quality: a practitioner-based questionnaire survey

Stevenson

Wood

2017

Software Qual J

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Design quality is vital if software is to be maintainable. What practices do developers actually use to achieve design quality in their day-to-day work and which of these do they find most useful? To discover the extent to which practitioners concern themselves with object-oriented design quality and the approaches used when determining quality in practice, a questionnaire survey of 102 software practitioners, approximately half from the UK and the remainder from elsewhere around the world was used. Individual and peer experience are major contributors to design quality. Classic design guidelines, well-known lower level practices, tools and metrics all can also contribute positively to design quality. There is a potential relationship between testing practices and design quality. Inexperience, time pressures, novel problems, novel technology, and imprecise or changing requirements may have a negative impact on quality. Respondents with most experience are more confident in their design decisions, place more value on reviews by team leads and are more likely to rate design quality as very important. For practitioners, these results identify the techniques and tools that other practitioners find effective. For researchers, the results highlight a need for more work investigating the role of experience in the design process and the contribution experience makes to quality. There is also the potential for more in-depth studies of how practitioners are actually using design guidance, including Clean Code. Lastly, the potential relationship between testing practices and design quality merits further investigation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Software Engineering Surveysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recognising object-oriented software design quality: a practitioner-based questionnaire survey

Stevenson

Wood

2017

Software Qual J

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“…On the other hand, there has also been increasing expectation by the software industry to instill this important skill into SE graduates as the economic impact of inadequate testing is still a major concern within the industry. In the software sector, testers mostly prefer functional or specification-based testing over structural testing (Chan et al, 2005;Garousi and Zhi, 2013;Ng et al, 2004) because the latter is considered more cumbersome and time-consuming and can only be used at the unit-testing level; whereas functional testing is not only used during unit testing, but it can also be employed during integration, system, and user-acceptance testing. Additionally, these different techniques require slightly different skills, such as structural testing which requires delving into further details, while functional testing is more logical.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, more work needs to be done in different settings to draw sound conclusions in this respect. Orginality/value: Although there are few studies (see, for example, Chan et al, 2005;Garousi and Zhi, 2013;Ng et al, 2004) exploring the preference of testers over distinct software testing techniques in the industry, there appears to be no paper comparing the preferences and performances of learners in terms of different testing techniques. …”

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confidence: 99%

Exploring and expanding students’ success in software testing

Mishra

Ostrovska

Hacaloğlu

2017

ITP

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Purpose: Testing is one of the indispensable activities in software development and is being adopted as an independent course by software engineering departments at universities worldwide. In this paper, an investigation of the performance of learners about testing is carried out, given the tendencies in the industry and motivation caused by the unavailability of similar studies in software testing field. Design/methodology/approach: This study is based on the data collected over three years (between 2012 and 2014) from students taking the Software Testing course. The course is included in the second year of undergraduate curriculum for the Bachelor of Engineering (Software Engineering). Findings: It has been observed that, from the performance perspective, automated testing outperforms structural and functional testing techniques, and that a strong correlation exists among these three approaches. Moreover, a strong programming background does help towards further success in structural and automated testing, but has no effect on functional testing. The results of different teaching styles within the course are also presented together with an analysis exploring the relationship between students' gender and success in the software testing course, revealing that there is no difference in terms of performance between male and female students in the course. Moreover, it is advisable to introduce teaching concepts one at a time because students find it difficult to grasp the ideas otherwise. Research Limitations: These findings are based on the analysis conducted using three years of data collected while teaching a course in testing. Obviously, there are some limitations to this study. For example, student's strength in programming is calculated using the score of C programming courses taken in previous year/semester. Such scores may not reflect their current level of programming knowledge. Furthermore, attempt was made to ensure that the exercises given for different testing techniques have similar difficulty level to guarantee that the difference in success between these testing techniques is due to the inherent complexity of the technique itself and not because of different exercises. Still, there is small probability that a certain degree of change in success may be due to the difference in the difficulty levels of the exercises. As such, it is obviously premature to consider the present results as final since there is a lack of similar type of studies, with which the authors can compare their results. Therefore, more work needs to be done in different settings to draw sound conclusions in this respect. Orginality/value: Although there are few studies (see, for example, Chan et al., 2005;Garousi and Zhi, 2013;Ng et al., 2004) exploring the preference of testers over distinct software testing techniques in the industry, there appears to be no paper comparing the preferences and performances of learners in terms of different testing techniques.

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“…By annotating sequence diagrams with risk information, we bring risk analysis to the work bench of testers without the burden of a separate risk analysis language, thus reducing the effort needed to adopt the approach. Recent surveys on trends within software testing show that the lack of time and high costs are still the dominating barriers to a successful adoption of testing methods and testing tools within IT organizations [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%