Bridge the Gap between Software Test Process and Business Value: A Case Study

Li, Qi; Li, Mingshu; Yang, Ye; Wang, Qing; Tan, Thomas; Boehm, Barry; Hu, Chenyong

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-01680-6_20

Cited by 13 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Future work would include adopting value-based principles to each QA activity to improve its effectiveness respectively, e.g. [10], and expand the basis of this approach to find a way to balance the effort distribution of QA activities to maximize its ROI. This would involve more data and analysis of the relative cost-effectiveness of the various techniques across various classes of defects [6], as being investigated in [15] via Orthogonal Defect Classification.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving the ROI of Software Quality Assurance Activities: An Empirical Study

Shu

Boehm

et al. 2010

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Review, process audit, and testing are three main Quality Assurance activities during the software development life cycle. They complement each other to examine work products for defects and improvement opportunities to the largest extent. Understanding the effort distribution and inter-correlation among them will facilitate software organization project planning, improve the software quality within the budget and schedule and make continuous process improvement. This paper reports some empirical findings of effort distribution pattern of the three types of QA activities from a series of incremental projects in China. The result of the study gives us some implications on how to identify which type of QA activity is insufficient while others might be overdone, how to balance the effort allocation and planning for future projects, how to improve the weak part of each QA activity and finally improve the Return On Investment (ROI) of QA activities and the whole process effectiveness under the specific organization context.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving the ROI of Software Quality Assurance Activities: An Empirical Study

Shu

Boehm

et al. 2010

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…The weights for these two factors can be changed. We have rated the benefit twice as heavily as the penalty ratings as defined in [6,7].…”

Section: Business Value Estimation For a Use Casementioning

confidence: 99%

“…A customer also cannot estimate the cost and 2 ISRN Software Engineering technical difficulties in implementing a specific high-level function. So, the adoption of value-based testing [6,7], where the information from the market and the customer is gathered to gain the knowledge of the importance of highlevel function, increases the return on investment (ROI) on testing. In our approach, we consider the business value associated with a component as a factor for computing criticality.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prioritizing Program Elements: A Pretesting Effort to Improve Software Quality

Ray

Mohapatra

2012

ISRN Software Engineering

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Improving the efficiency of a testing process is a challenging task. Prior work has shown that often, a small number of bugs account for the majority of the reported software failures; and often, most bugs are found in a small portion of the source code of a program. First, prioritizing the code elements according to their criticality and then conducting testing, will promote to reveal the important bugs at the early phase of testing. Keeping it in view, we propose an efficient test effort prioritization method that give a chance to the tester to focus more on the parts of the source code that are highly influenced towards the system failures or in which, the failures have high impact on the system. We consider five important factors such as influence towards system failures, average execution time, structural complexity, severity, and business value associated with a component and estimates the criticality of the component within a system. We have experimentally proved that our proposed test effort prioritization approach is effective in revealing important bugs at the early phase of testing as it is linked to external measure of defect severity and business value, internal measure of frequency, complexity, and coupling.

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“…Several studies have been carried out to investigate the ROI of test automation [4][5][6][7][8][9]. However, these studies are limited as they either focus exclusively on the process step of test execution, or calculate the ROI exclusively based on variables which must be converted to one unit (typically 'time', 'effort' or 'cost') and thus ignore influencing factors that cannot be transformed into a unique unit (e.g., variables representing 'size', 'skill', or 'quality'), or merely present theoretical models without empirical evaluation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When to automate software testing? decision support based on system dynamics: an industrial case study

Sahaf

Garousi

Pfahl

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Software and System Process

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Software test processes are complex and costly. To reduce testing effort without compromising effectiveness and product quality, automation of test activities has been adopted as a popular approach in software industry. However, since test automation usually requires substantial upfront investments, automation is not always more cost-effective than manual testing. To support decision-makers in finding the optimal degree of test automation in a given project, we propose in this paper a simulation model using the System Dynamics (SD) modeling technique. With the help of the simulation model, we can evaluate the performance of test processes with varying degrees of automation of test activities and help testers choose the most optimal cases. As the case study, we describe how we used our simulation model in the context of an Action Research (AR) study conducted in collaboration with a software company in Calgary, Canada. The goal of the study was to investigate how the simulation model can help decision-makers decide whether and to what degree the company should automate their test processes. As a first step, we compared the performances of the current fully manual testing with several cases of partly automated testing as anticipated for implementation in the partner company. The development of the simulation model as well as the analysis of simulation results helped the partner company to get a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of their current test process and supported decision-makers in the cost effective planning of improvements of selected test activities.

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Bridge the Gap between Software Test Process and Business Value: A Case Study

Cited by 13 publications

References 18 publications

Improving the ROI of Software Quality Assurance Activities: An Empirical Study

Improving the ROI of Software Quality Assurance Activities: An Empirical Study

Prioritizing Program Elements: A Pretesting Effort to Improve Software Quality

When to automate software testing? decision support based on system dynamics: an industrial case study

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