57 research outputs found
Enablers and Impediments for Collaborative Research in Software Testing: An Empirical Exploration
When it comes to industrial organizations, current collaboration efforts in
software engineering research are very often kept in-house, depriving these
organizations off the skills necessary to build independent collaborative
research. The current trend, towards empirical software engineering research,
requires certain standards to be established which would guide these
collaborative efforts in creating a strong partnership that promotes
independent, evidence-based, software engineering research. This paper examines
key enabling factors for an efficient and effective industry-academia
collaboration in the software testing domain. A major finding of the research
was that while technology is a strong enabler to better collaboration, it must
be complemented with industrial openness to disclose research results and the
use of a dedicated tooling platform. We use as an example an automated test
generation approach that has been developed in the last two years
collaboratively with Bombardier Transportation AB in Sweden
Towards a Model of Testers\u27 Cognitive Processes: Software Testing as a Problem Solving Approach
Software testing is a complex, intellectual activity based (at least) on analysis, reasoning, decision making, abstraction and collaboration performed in a highly demanding environment. Naturally, it uses and allocates multiple cognitive resources in software testers. However, while a cognitive psychology perspective is increasingly used in the general software engineering literature, it has yet to find its place in software testing. To the best of our knowledge, no theory of software testers\u27 cognitive processes exists. Here, we take the first step towards such a theory by presenting a cognitive model of software testing based on how problem solving is conceptualized in cognitive psychology. Our approach is to instantiate a general problem solving process for the specific problem of creating test cases. We then propose an experiment for testing our cognitive test design model. The experiment makes use of verbal protocol analysis to understand the mechanisms by which human testers choose, design, implement and evaluate test cases. An initial evaluation was then performed with five software engineering master students as subjects. The results support a problem solving-based model of test design for capturing testers\u27 cognitive processes
Towards a Model of Testers' Cognitive Processes: Software Testing as a Problem Solving Approach
Software testing is a complex, intellectual activity based (at least) on
analysis, reasoning, decision making, abstraction and collaboration performed
in a highly demanding environment. Naturally, it uses and allocates multiple
cognitive resources in software testers. However, while a cognitive psychology
perspective is increasingly used in the general software engineering
literature, it has yet to find its place in software testing. To the best of
our knowledge, no theory of software testers' cognitive processes exists. Here,
we take the first step towards such a theory by presenting a cognitive model of
software testing based on how problem solving is conceptualized in cognitive
psychology. Our approach is to instantiate a general problem solving process
for the specific problem of creating test cases. We then propose an experiment
for testing our cognitive test design model. The experiment makes use of verbal
protocol analysis to understand the mechanisms by which human testers choose,
design, implement and evaluate test cases. An initial evaluation was then
performed with five software engineering master students as subjects. The
results support a problem solving-based model of test design for capturing
testers' cognitive processes.Comment: (v3) minor issues fixed, Accepted and presented in the IEEE
International Workshop on Human and Social Aspects of Software Quality (HASQ
2020
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