What makes agile test artifacts useful?: An activity-based quality model from a practitioners' perspectiveShow others and affiliations
2020 (English)In: International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, IEEE Computer Society, 2020, article id 3421462Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Background: The artifacts used in Agile software testing and the reasons why these artifacts are used are fairly well-understood. However, empirical research on how Agile test artifacts are eventually designed in practice and which quality factors make them useful for software testing remains sparse. Aims: Our objective is two-fold. First, we identify current challenges in using test artifacts to understand why certain quality factors are considered good or bad. Second, we build an Activity-Based Artifact Quality Model that describes what Agile test artifacts should look like. Method: We conduct an industrial survey with 18 practitioners from 12 companies operating in seven different domains. Results: Our analysis reveals nine challenges and 16 factors describing the quality of six test artifacts from the perspective of Agile testers. Interestingly, we observed mostly challenges regarding language and traceability, which are well-known to occur in non-Agile projects. Conclusions: Although Agile software testing is becoming the norm, we still have little confidence about general do's and don'ts going beyond conventional wisdom. This study is the first to distill a list of quality factors deemed important to what can be considered as useful test artifacts. © 2020 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
IEEE Computer Society, 2020. article id 3421462
Series
International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, ISSN 1949-3770, E-ISSN 1949-3789
Keywords [en]
Agile testing, Artifact quality, Industrial survey, Surveys, Well testing, Activity-based, Different domains, Empirical research, Industrial surveys, Quality factors, Quality modeling, Software testing
National Category
Software Engineering
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:bth-20756DOI: 10.1145/3382494.3421462Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85095816859ISBN: 9781450375801 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:bth-20756DiVA, id: diva2:1502642
Conference
14th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, ESEM 2020, Virtual, Online, Italy, 5 October 2020 through 7 October 2020
Part of project
SERT- Software Engineering ReThought, Knowledge Foundation
Note
open access
2020-11-202020-11-202023-03-24Bibliographically approved