Enablers, inhibitors, and perceptions of testing in novice software teams

Abstract

There are many different approaches to testing software, with different benefits for software quality and the development process. Yet, it is not well understood what developers struggle with when getting started with testing-and why some do not test at all or not as much as would be good for their project. This missing understanding keeps us from improving processes and tools to help novices adopt proper testing practices.We conducted a qualitative study with 97 computer science students. Through interviews, we explored their experiences and attitudes regarding testing in a collaborative software project. We found enabling and inhibiting factors for testing activities, the different testing strategies they used, and novices' perceptions and attitudes of testing. Students push test automation to the end of the project, thus robbing themselves from the advantages of having a test suite during implementation. Students were not convinced of the return of investment in automated tests and opted for laborious manual tests-which they often regretted in the end. Understanding such challenges and opportunities novices face when confronted with adopting testing can help us improve testing processes, company policies, and tools. Our findings provide recommendations that can enable organizations to facilitate the adoption of testing practices by their members.

When, how, and why developers (do not) test in their IDEs

“…Pham et al [38] interviewed 97 computer science students and observed that novice developer perceive testing as a secondary task. The authors conjectured that students are not motivated to test as they have not experienced its long-term benefits.…”

“…The work presented in this paper differs from the aforementioned works in that the data that we use is not obtained (1) from a software repository [3,4,27,36,41] or (2) purely by means of a survey or interview [37][38][39]42]. Instead, our data is automatically gathered inside the IDE, which makes it (1) more fine-grained than commitlevel activities and (2) more objective than surveys.…”

Improving the software testing skills of novices during onboarding through social transparency

“…Every computer science student must take it shortly before acquiring her bachelor's degree 1 . We found that these inexperienced developers have trouble applying basic testing techniques [10]. Often systematic testing is neglected for various reasons.…”

“…Without guidance, inexperienced developers misperceive the return on investment value of test automation efforts. They focus on efforts of maintaining a test suite during development and regard it as technical debt [10]. Such a skewed view on software testing is problematic, as these students apply for engineering positions in software companies.…”

“…Specific pairing strategies for the new hire and expert developers target orthogonal skill sets and facilitate cross-pollination. Open environments, an open and not accusing discussion 1 The course's structure is described in more detail in [10] Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.…”