Beyond Technical Skills in Software Testing

Sánchez‐Gordón, Mary; Rijal, Laxmi; Colomo‐Palacios, Ricardo

doi:10.1145/3387940.3392238

Cited by 21 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Software testing is critical to preventing software failures, but is, arguably, the least understood part of the software life cycle and the toughest aspect of software development to perform correctly [1]. Adequate research has been carried out on both the process and technology dimensions of testing [2] [3], but not much on the human dimensions [4] [5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

International Comparative Studies on the Software Testing Profession

Capretz

Waychal²,

Jia

et al. 2021

IT Prof.

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This work attempts to fill a gap by exploring the human dimension in particular, by trying to understand the motivation of software professionals for taking up and sustaining their careers as software testers. Towards that goal, four surveys were conducted in four countries -India, Canada, Cuba, and China -to try to understand how professional software engineers perceive and value work-related factors that could influence their motivation to start or move into software testing careers. From our sample of 220 software professionals, we observed that very few were keen to take up testing careers. Some aspects of software testing, such as the potential for learning opportunities and the importance of the job, appear to be common motivators across the four countries, whereas the treatment of testers as second-class citizens and the complexity of the job appeared to be the most prominent de-motivators.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

International Comparative Studies on the Software Testing Profession

Capretz

Waychal²,

Jia

et al. 2021

IT Prof.

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“…There is a need to improve understanding of the part that software testers play in agile projects, and especially the human aspects (Sánchez-Gordón et al, 2020). Through the literature review, we found several common characteristics of software testers, such as being open-minded, curios, disciplined, and paying attention to details (Kanij et al, 2015;Livonen et al, 2010;Matturro, 2013;Deak, 2014b).…”

Section: Human Factors Of the Agile Software Testermentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Davidov et al (2010) described testers as professionals who identify new defects from failed test cases, analyze defects, and report them in a bug-tracking system. However, the testing process requires not only technical skills but also specific socio-technical abilities (Florea & Stray, 2018;Sánchez-Gordón et al, 2020); therefore, an efficient software tester is needed to cover a broad area of abilities and expertise, frequently extending beyond testing. For instance, in agile, software testers play a key role in connecting developers with development stakeholders and customers by intimately understanding and tracing business requirements throughout development (Saiedian & Dale, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, in agile, software testers play a key role in connecting developers with development stakeholders and customers by intimately understanding and tracing business requirements throughout development (Saiedian & Dale, 2000). Nevertheless, there is a need for further studies focusing on agile testers' soft skills (Sánchez-Gordón et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Exploring human factors of the agile software tester

2021

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Although extensive research has been conducted on the characteristics of the agile developer, little attention has been given to the features of the software-testing role. This paper explores the human factors of the software testers working in agile projects through a qualitative study focusing on how these factors are perceived. We interviewed 22 agile software practitioners working in three international companies: 14 testers, five developers, and three designers. Additionally, we observed 11 meetings and daily work of 13 participants in one of the companies. Our findings show that the views on the human factors shaping the agile software tester’s role were crystallized into seven traits, which the agile team members saw as central for the software-testing role: the ability to see the whole picture, good communication skills, detail-orientation, structuredness, creativeness, curiosity, and adaptability. The testers spent half their day communicating and learned how to mitigate the fact that they had to bring bad news to other project members. They also facilitated communication between the business side and development. Based on our results, we propose the seven traits as dimensions to consider for organizations recruiting agile software testers, as well as a reference for IT and non-IT professionals considering a software-testing career.

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“…Even moderate-sized software projects takes up hundreds of person-hours dedicated to writing test cases -conditions to test for and pass/fail criteria, implementing them, and meticulously documenting the results of those tests. In fact, software testing is considered an art [24] requiring its own technical and non-technical skills [31,22], and entire career paths are built around testing [4]. Test-driven development, often associated with agile software engineering frameworks, is a practice which integrates testing considerations in all parts of the development process [1,10].…”

Section: Processes That Guide the Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking Beyond Distributions in Testing Machine Learned Models

Rostamzadeh¹,

Hutchinson²,

Greer³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Testing practices within the machine learning (ML) community have centered around assessing a learned model's predictive performance measured against a test dataset, often drawn from the same distribution as the training dataset. While recent work on robustness and fairness testing within the ML community has pointed to the importance of testing against distributional shifts, these efforts also focus on estimating the likelihood of the model making an error against a reference dataset/distribution. We argue that this view of testing actively discourages researchers and developers from looking into other sources of robustness failures, for instance corner cases which may have severe undesirable impacts. We draw parallels with decades of work within software engineering testing focused on assessing a software system against various stress conditions, including corner cases, as opposed to solely focusing on average-case behaviour. Finally, we put forth a set of recommendations to broaden the view of machine learning testing to a rigorous practice.

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Beyond Technical Skills in Software Testing

Cited by 21 publications

References 12 publications

International Comparative Studies on the Software Testing Profession

International Comparative Studies on the Software Testing Profession

Exploring human factors of the agile software tester

Thinking Beyond Distributions in Testing Machine Learned Models

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