Impacts of the Organizational Model on Testing: Three Industrial Cases

Ahonen, Jarmo J.; Junttila, Tuukka; Sakkinen, Markku

doi:10.1023/b:emse.0000039880.99096.af

Cited by 30 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Some studies show that test cases are seldom rigorously used and documented. Instead, practitioners report that they find test cases difficult to design and, in some cases, even quite useless (Ahonen et al, 2004;Andersson and Runeson, 2002;Itkonen and Rautiainen, 2005). In practice, it seems that test case selection and design is often left to individual testers and the lack of structured test case design techniques is not found as a problem (Andersson and Runeson, 2002).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are undoubtedly certain strengths with the TCT approach. It provides explicit expected outputs for the testers and handles complex relationships in the functionality systematically (Itkonen et al, 2007;Ahonen et al, 2004;Itkonen, 2008;Ryber, 2007;Grechanik et al, 2009;Yamaura, 2002;Taipale et al, 2006). The test case documentation can also provide benefits later in the regression testing reuse.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An experiment on the effectiveness and efficiency of exploratory testing

et al. 2014

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The exploratory testing (ET) approach is commonly applied in industry, but lacks scientific research. The scientific community needs quantitative results on the performance of ET taken from realistic experimental settings. The objective of this paper is to quantify the effectiveness and efficiency of ET vs. testing with documented test cases (test case based testing, TCT). We performed four controlled experiments where a total of 24 practitioners and 46 students performed manual functional testing using ET and TCT. We measured the number of identified defects in the 90-minute testing sessions of testing, the detection difficulty, severity and types of the detected defects, and the number of false defect reports. The results show that ET found a significantly greater number of defects. ET also found significantly more defects of varying levels of difficulty, types and severity levels. The two testing approaches, however, did not differ significantly in terms of the number of false defect reports submitted. We conclude that ET was more efficient than TCT in our experiment. ET was also more effective than TCT when detection difficulty, type of defects and severity levels are considered. However, the two approaches are comparable when it comes to the number of false defect reports submitted.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An experiment on the effectiveness and efficiency of exploratory testing

et al. 2014

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“…At site four testing is shaped by who is available, what rooms are available and where, and what equipment is available. Ahonen et al (2004) discuss the effects of organisational structure on the testing process and results, finding it has a significant impact. There is clearly a resemblance between our findings and those of Ahonen et al, although we are emphasising different aspects of organisation.…”

Section: Features Of Testing In the Wildmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing in the Wild: The Social and Organisational Dimensions of Real World Practice

Rooksby

Rouncefield

Sommerville

2009

Comput Supported Coop Work

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Testing is a key part of any systems engineering project. There is an extensive literature on testing, but very little that focuses on how testing is carried out in real-world circumstances. This is partly because current practices are often seen as unsophisticated and ineffective. We believe that by investigating and characterising the real-world work of testing we can help question why such 'bad practices' occur and how improvements might be made. We also argue that the testing literature is too focused on technological issues when many of the problems, and indeed strengths, have as much do with work and organisation. In this paper we use empirical examples from four systems engineering projects to demonstrate how and in what ways testing is a cooperative activity. In particular we demonstrate the ways in which testing is situated within organisational work and satisfices organisational and marketplace demands.

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“…Therefore, ET embraces similar values as agile development and combines learning, test design, and test execution into one test approach [11]. Following this approach, testers can freely explore an application by utilizing human intuition and experience [4], [24]. As it is not explicit how testers make this exploration, ET is often referred to as 'ad hoc' testing [1].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing a Hybrid Testing Process with Scripted and Exploratory Testing: An Experimental Study with Practitioners

Shah

Alvi²,

Gencel

et al. 2014

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

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Abstract. This study presents an experimental study comparing the testing quality of a Hybrid Testing (HT) process with the commonly used approaches in industry: Scripted Testing (ST) and Exploratory Testing (ET). The study was conducted in an international IT service company in Sweden with the involvement of six experienced testers. Two measures were used for comparison: 1) defect detection effectiveness (DDE) and 2) functionality coverage (FC). The results indicated that HT performed better in terms of DDE than ST and worse than ET. In terms of FC, HT performed better than ET, while no significant differences were observed between the HT and ST. Furthermore, HT performed best for experienced testers, but worse with less experienced testers.

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Impacts of the Organizational Model on Testing: Three Industrial Cases

Cited by 30 publications

References 12 publications

An experiment on the effectiveness and efficiency of exploratory testing

An experiment on the effectiveness and efficiency of exploratory testing

Testing in the Wild: The Social and Organisational Dimensions of Real World Practice

Comparing a Hybrid Testing Process with Scripted and Exploratory Testing: An Experimental Study with Practitioners

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