Many software projects in Cameroon and elsewhere fail to produce the desired quality product due to low adoption of good software testing practices, including test automation. The fundamental questions are what are the local barriers to adopting structured approaches to specifying test cases? And what obstacles are preventing software testing from being automated? To answer these questions, this study analyzes software testing practices in Cameroon. The ultimate objective is to issue recommendations on the directions in which to direct research on software testing, in order to provide solutions promoting the adoption of good testing practices in projects, taking into account limited financial and human resources in developing countries. To do this, a survey was carried out among companies that carry out software development activities. The analysis of the results obtained reveals several interesting elements among which we can cite: (a) more than 80% of the respondents do not ensure that there has been a test other than that of the developer who does not follow a structured approach, (b) automated tests represent less than 8% of the number of tests carried out, (c) the most recurrent factors against test automation are the time required to configure or adapt the tools, the acquisition and implementation costs, costs of design, development, and maintenance of test cases.

Abstract

In an information system, applications often make use of services that they access using the parameters described in their configuration files. Various applications then use different codes to denote the same parameters. When access parameters of a service are modified, it is necessary to update them in every configuration file using them. These changes are necessary, for example because of security policies involving regular changes of passwords, or departure of some system administrators. The database password could be changed for example. When system administrators can not immediately identify all services affected by a change or when they feel they don't have the skills to edit these files, these parameters remain unchanged, creating critical security flaws. This was observed in more than 80% of the organizations we studied. It then becomes necessary to ensure automatic synchronization of all affected files when changing certain settings. Conventional synchronization solutions are difficult to apply when the relevant applications have already been developed by third parties. In this paper, we propose and implement a solution to automatically update all configuration files affected by a change, respecting their structure and codification. It combines a parameters database, a mapping between the configuration files parameters codes and those of the database, and templates for the generation of files. It achieves the objective for all non-encrypted configuration files.

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