7 research outputs found
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How well do professional developers test with code coverage visualizations? An empirical study
"Code coverage visualizations using block coverage neither guided developers
toward productive testing strategies, nor did these visualizations motivate
developers to write more tests or help them find more faults than the control
group. Nevertheless, code coverage visualizations did influence developers in a
few important ways. Code coverage visualizations led developers to overestimate
their test effectiveness more than the control group. Yet, these same visualizations
reduced the variability in the number of test cases developers wrote by changing
the standard developers used to evaluate their test effectiveness.
Thus, the true power of testing visualizations lies not only with the faults
that visualizations can highlight; it also lies in how visualizations can change how
developers think about testing. Testing visualizations guide developers toward
a particular standard of effectiveness, so if we want developers to test software
adequately, we must ensure that the coverage criteria we choose to visualize leads
developers toward a good standard of test effectiveness."--Conclusio
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How well do professional developers test with code coverage visualizations? : an empirical study
Professional software developers do not test code adequately, even though testing tools are widely available. Until developers realize the deficiencies in their tests, inadequate testing of software seems likely to remain a major problem. To support developers writing tests, industry and researchers have proposed systems that visualize “testedness” for end-user and professional developers. Empirical studies of such systems for end-user programmers have begun to show success at helping end users write more effective tests. Encouraged by this research, we examined the effect that code coverage visualizations have on the effectiveness of test cases that professional software developers write. This paper presents the results of an empirical study conducted using code coverage visualizations found in a commercially available programming environment. Our results reveal that block coverage visualizations shaped developer behavior, but also led developers to overestimate how many faults their tests revealed
Showstoppers for Continuous Delivery in Small Scale Projects
Small scale projects outsourced to consultants provide their own difficulties when compared to more standard software development. Some of these problems are a lack of infrastructure and customers inexperienced with software development. This thesis is looking at the possibility of implementing continuous delivery in such an environment. The concrete problems are small projects with very little room for experimentation. But also the inexperience in automated testing which is essential for efficient regression testing. This led this thesis in two directions. The first one is how can you create a situation where continuous delivery could be beneficial, where developers prefer writing automated test cases instead of performing Ad Hoc manual testing during development and relying on a larger testing phase towards the end, much like what is done in waterfall development. The solution is to perform more deliveries to the customer throughout the project, with the customer having the responsibility of providing feedback on these deliveries. For the developers to embrace automated testing, a shift in focus is needed, from functional testing through the GUI to smaller unit and integration tests that will be easier to write and maintain. The other direction is addressing the fact that there is very little to continuously deliver during early stages of development, which could essentially make up half the project length. But also that there are several small projects each year. Making configuration management a support function for projects allows for standardisation and sharing the cost between all the projects