TY - GEN
T1 - How can manual testing processes be optimized? developer survey, optimization guidelines, and case studies
AU - Haas, Roman
AU - Elsner, Daniel
AU - Juergens, Elmar
AU - Pretschner, Alexander
AU - Apel, Sven
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/8/20
Y1 - 2021/8/20
N2 - Manual software testing is tedious and costly as it involves significant human effort. Yet, it is still widely applied in industry and will be in the foreseeable future. Although there is arguably a great need for optimization of manual testing processes, research focuses mostly on optimization techniques for automated tests. Accordingly, there is no precise understanding of the practices and processes of manual testing in industry nor about pitfalls and optimization potential that is untapped. To shed light on this issue, we conducted a survey among 38 testing professionals from 16 companies, to investigate their manual testing processes and to identify potential for optimization. We synthesize guidelines when optimization techniques from automated testing can be implemented for manual testing. By means of case studies on two industrial software projects, we show that fault detection likelihood, test feedback time and test creation efforts can be improved when following our guidelines.
AB - Manual software testing is tedious and costly as it involves significant human effort. Yet, it is still widely applied in industry and will be in the foreseeable future. Although there is arguably a great need for optimization of manual testing processes, research focuses mostly on optimization techniques for automated tests. Accordingly, there is no precise understanding of the practices and processes of manual testing in industry nor about pitfalls and optimization potential that is untapped. To shed light on this issue, we conducted a survey among 38 testing professionals from 16 companies, to investigate their manual testing processes and to identify potential for optimization. We synthesize guidelines when optimization techniques from automated testing can be implemented for manual testing. By means of case studies on two industrial software projects, we show that fault detection likelihood, test feedback time and test creation efforts can be improved when following our guidelines.
KW - Software testing
KW - manual testing
KW - test optimization
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85116297167&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3468264.3473922
DO - 10.1145/3468264.3473922
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85116297167
T3 - ESEC/FSE 2021 - Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
SP - 1281
EP - 1291
BT - ESEC/FSE 2021 - Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
A2 - Spinellis, Diomidis
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 29th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2021
Y2 - 23 August 2021 through 28 August 2021
ER -