Software Testing is Serious Business: A Holistic Approach

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Software testing is a crucial supporting processes of the software life cycle. Unfortunately for the software industry, the role of software tester is stigmatized, mostly due to misconceptions associated with the role and partly because the treatment given to software testers. Therefore the role of software tester does not appear to be one of the preferred roles among software practitioners. A complete shift in the software testing mindset is necessary in order to empower software engineers to create software-enabled world that can be relied upon. There is a need for reversing the professional's perceptions regarding this role by using career progression and other related approaches, both non-technical and technical, to reinforce the crucial dimension that software testers brings to the projects. It has been pointed out that social factors play a significant role in software testing practices. This research addresses previously uncarved enablers in the realm of software testing, namely social insight into testing and test visualization. These two enablers will bring about the three key innovations of this research program that combined will greatly expand the knowledge needed by software engineers with regard to testing. This understanding will support building the theory needed by software engineers during testing. The proposed research projects are a vital component of the PI's research vision and are intended to pursue the following three objectives: (a) a model describing human stimuli and inhibitors for software testing by studying the (un)popularity of software testing among software engineering students and software practitioners; (b) a novel test analytics engine that encompasses a wide variety of software development data. These analytics enable software engineers to get insight into test activities at the personal and team level; and (c) a new test visualization approach that facilitates understanding test scenarios and highlighting possibilities for variation in existing test scenarios. The insights thus obtained broaden the scope of test scenarios, stimulating the creation of both best case and worst case test scenarios and making the creation of variant test scenarios easier and more effective.