[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/ skip to main content
10.1145/3319008.3319018acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageseaseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Practitioner Evaluations on Software Testing Tools

Published: 15 April 2019 Publication History

Abstract

In software engineering practice, evaluating and selecting the software testing tools that best fit the project at hand is an important and challenging task. In scientific studies of software engineering, practitioner evaluations and beliefs have recently gained interest, and some studies suggest that practitioners find beliefs of peers more credible than empirical evidence. To study how software practitioners evaluate testing tools, we applied online opinion surveys (n=89). We analyzed the reliability of the opinions utilizing Krippendorff's alpha, intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC), and coefficients of variation (CV). Negative binomial regression was used to evaluate the effect of demographics. We find that opinions towards a specific tool can be conflicting. We show how increasing the number of respondents improves the reliability of the estimates measured with ICC. Our results indicate that on average, opinions from seven experts provide a moderate level of reliability. From demographics, we find that technical seniority leads to more negative evaluations. To improve the understanding, robustness, and impact of the findings, we need to conduct further studies by utilizing diverse sources and complementary methods.

References

[1]
Mohsen Anvaari, Carl-Fredrik Sørensen, and Olaf Zimmermann. 2016. Associating Architectural Issues with Quality Attributes: A Survey on Expert Agreement. In Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Software Architecture Workshops (ECSAW '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 11, 7 pages.
[2]
Gayane Azizyan, Miganoush K. Magarian, and Mira Kajko-Matsson. 2011. Survey of Agile Tool Usage and Needs. In 2011 Agile Conference. IEEE, Salt Lake City, UT, USA, 29--38.
[3]
Bajaj Harsh, Infosys. 2015. Choosing the right automation tool. https://www.infosys.com/it-services/validation-solutions/white-papers/documents/choosing-right-automation-tool.pdf.
[4]
Markus Borg, Iben Lennerstad, Rasmus Ros, and Elizabeth Bjarnason. 2017. On Using Active Learning and Self-training when Mining Performance Discussions on Stack Overflow. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, EASE'17. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 308--313.
[5]
Anne Bruton, Joy H Conway, and Stephen T Holgate. 2000. Reliability: What is it, and how is it measured. Physiotherapy 86, 2 (2000), 94--99.
[6]
Capgemini Consulting. 2015. World Quality Report 2014--2015, Sixth Edition, 2014. https://www.sogeti.com/explore/reports/world-quality-report-2014-2015/.
[7]
Capgemini Consulting. 2016. World Quality Report 2015--2016, 2015. https://www.sogeti.com/explore/reports/world-quality-report-2015-2016/.
[8]
Adnan Causevic, Daniel Sundmark, and Sasikumar Punnekkat. 2010. An Industrial Survey on Contemporary Aspects of Software Testing. In 2010 3rd International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, Vol. 1. IEEE, USA, 393--401.
[9]
Varun Chandola, Arindam Banerjee, and Vipin Kumar. 2009. Anomaly Detection: A Survey. ACM Comput. Surv. 41, 3, Article 15 (July 2009), 58 pages.
[10]
Prem Devanbu, Thomas Zimmermann, and Christian Bird. 2016. Belief & Evidence in Empirical Software Engineering. In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 108--119.
[11]
Arilo Claudio Dias-Neto, Santiago Matalonga, Martín Solari, Gabriela Robiolo, and Guilherme Horta Travassos. 2017. Toward the characterization of software testing practices in South America: looking at Brazil and Uruguay. Software Quality Journal 25, 4 (01 Dec 2017), 1145--1183.
[12]
Tore Dybå, Dag I.K. Sjøberg, and Daniela S. Cruzes. 2012. What Works for Whom, Where, when, and Why?: On the Role of Context in Empirical Software Engineering. In Proceedings of the ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 19--28.
[13]
Emelie Engström and Per Runeson. 2010. A qualitative survey of regression testing practices. In Product-Focused Software Process Improvement/Lecture Notes in Computer Science, M. A. Babar, M. Vierimaa, and M. Oivo (Eds.) (Eds.), Vol. 6156. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 3--16.
[14]
Arlene Fink. 1995. The Survey Handbook. Sage publications, CA, USA.
[15]
Vahid Garousi and Mika V. Mäntylä". 2016. When and what to automate in software testing? A multi-vocal literature review. Information and Software Technology 76 (2016), 92--117.
[16]
Vahid Garousi and Junji Zhi. 2013. A survey of software testing practices in Canada. Journal of Systems and Software 86, 5 (2013), 1354--1376.
[17]
Adam M. Geras, Michael R. Smith, and James Miller. 2004. A survey of software testing practices in alberta. Canadian Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering 29, 3 (July 2004), 183--191.
[18]
Jorge Goncalves, Simo Hosio, and Vassilis Kostakos. 2017. Eliciting Structured Knowledge from Situated Crowd Markets. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 17, 2, Article 14 (mar 2017), 21 pages.
[19]
Kevin A. Hallgren. 2012. Computing Inter-Rater Reliability for Observational Data: An Overview and Tutorial. Tutorials in quantitative methods for psychology 8, 1 (2012), 23--34. http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC3402032
[20]
Helppi, Ville-Veikko. Bitbar Technologies. 2015. The Basics Of Test Automation For Apps, Games, Mobile Web. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/basic-test-automation-for-apps-games-and-mobile-web/.
[21]
Simo Hosio, Jorge Goncalves, Theodoros Anagnostopoulos, and Vassilis Kostakos. 2016. Leveraging Wisdom of the Crowd for Decision Support. In Proceedings of the 30th International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference: Fusion! (HCI '16). BCS Learning & Development Ltd., Swindon, UK, Article 38, 12 pages.
[22]
Simo Hosio, Jorge Goncalves, Vassilis Kostakos, and Jukka Riekki. 2015. Crowd-sourcing Public Opinion Using Urban Pervasive Technologies: Lessons From Real-Life Experiments in Oulu. Policy & Internet 7, 2 (2015), 203--222.
[23]
ISTQB (International Software Testing Qualifications Board). 2016. Worldwide Software Testing Practices Report 2015--2016. https://www.istqb.org/documents/ISTQB_Worldwide_Software_Testing_Practices_Report.pdf.
[24]
Tanjila Kanij, Robert Merkel, and John Grundy. 2013. Lessons learned from conducting industry surveys in software testing. In 2013 1st International Workshop on Conducting Empirical Studies in Industry (CESI). IEEE, NJ, USA, 63--66.
[25]
Barbara A. Kitchenham and Shari L. Pfleeger. 2008. Personal Opinion Surveys. Springer London, London, 63--92.
[26]
Barbara A. Kitchenham, Shari L. Pfleeger, Lesley M. Pickard, W. Jones, Peter, David C. Hoaglin, Khaled El Emam, and Jarrett Rosenberg. 2002. Preliminary guidelines for empirical research in software engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 28, 8 (Aug 2002), 721--734.
[27]
Barbara Ann Kitchenham, Dag I.K. Sjøberg, Tore Dybå, Dietmar Pfahl, Pearl Brereton, David Budgen, Martin Höst, and Per Runeson. 2012. Three empirical studies on the agreement of reviewers about the quality of software engineering experiments. Information and Software Technology 54, 8 (2012), 804--819. Special Issue: Voice of the Editorial Board.
[28]
Terry K. Koo and Mae Y. Li. 2016. A Guideline of Selecting and Reporting Intraclass Correlation Coefficients for Reliability Research. Journal of Chiropractic Medicine 15, 2 (2016), 155-163.
[29]
Klaus Krippendorff. 2004. Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, USA.
[30]
Klaus Krippendorff. 2011. Computing Krippendorff's Alpha Reliability. Retrieved May 18, 2018 from https://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/43
[31]
Tarald O. Kvålseth. 1995. Coefficients of Variation for Nominal and Ordinal Categorical Data. Perceptual and Motor Skills 80, 3 (1995), 843--847.
[32]
J. Lee, S. Kang, and D. Lee. 2012. Survey on software testing practices. IET Software 6, 3 (2012), 275--282.
[33]
Robert Libby and Roger K. Blashfield. 1978. Performance of a composite as a function of the number of judges. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 21, 2 (1978), 121--129.
[34]
A.E. Mannes, Jack B. Soll, and Richard P. Larrick. 2014. The wisdom of select crowds. Personality and Social Psychology 107, 2 (2014), 276--299.
[35]
Jason W. Osborne and Amy Overbay. 2004. The power of outliers (and why researchers should ALWAYS check for them). Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation 9, 6 (2004), 1--8. https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/doaj/15317714/2004/00000009/00000006/art00001
[36]
Amantia Pano, Daniel Graziotin, and Pekka Abrahamsson. 2018. Factors and actors leading to the adoption of a JavaScript framework. "Article in Press".
[37]
Carol Passos, Ana P. Braun, Daniela S. Cruzes, and Manoel Mendonca. 2011. Analyzing the Impact of Beliefs in Software Project Practices. In 2011 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement. IEEE, Banff, AB, Canada, 444--452.
[38]
Michael Quinn Patton. 2002. Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods, 3rd. ed. Sage publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, USA.
[39]
Robert M. Poston and Michael P. Sexton. 1992. Evaluating and selecting testing tools. In {1992} Proceedings of the Second Symposium on Assessment of Quality Software Development Tools. IEEE, New Orleans, LA, USA, 55--64.
[40]
QASource. 2016. A Guide to Selecting The Best Test Automation Tool. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6dKdxaNjBENY3pxMkgwb3BneVk.
[41]
Dudekula Mohammad Rafi, Katam Reddy Kiran Moses, Kai Petersen, and Mika V. Mäntylä. 2012. Benefits and Limitations of Automated Software Testing: Systematic Literature Review and Practitioner Survey. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Automation of Software Test (AST '12). IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, Article 6, 7 pages. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2663608.2663616
[42]
Pär J. Ågerfalk and Brian Fitzgerald. 2008. Outsourcing to an Unknown Workforce: Exploring Opensourcing as a Global Sourcing Strategy. MIS Quarterly 32, 2 (2008), 385--409. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25148845
[43]
Austen Rainer, Timothy Hall, and Nathan Baddoo. 2003. Persuading developers to "buy into" software process improvement: a local opinion and empirical evidence. In 2003 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, 2003. ISESE 2003. Proceedings. IEEE, Rome, Italy, 326--335.
[44]
Päivi Raulamo-Jurvanen, Kari Kakkonen, and Mika Mäntylä. 2016. Using Surveys and Web-Scraping to Select Tools for Software Testing Consultancy. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 285--300.
[45]
Päivi Raulamo-Jurvanen, Mika Mäntylä, and Vahid Garousi. 2017. Choosing the Right Test Automation Tool: A Grey Literature Review of Practitioner Sources. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE'17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 3, 10 pages.
[46]
Patrick E. Shrout and Joseph L. Fleiss. 1979. Intraclass Correlations: Uses in Assessing Rater Reliability. Psychological Bulletin 86, 2 (July 1979), 420--428.
[47]
Steven E. Stemler. 2004. A Comparison of Consensus, Consistency, and Measurement Approaches to Estimating Interrater Reliability. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation 9, 4 (2004), 1--11. https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/doaj/15317714/2004/00000009/00000004/art00001
[48]
James Surowiecki. 2005. The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor, New York, USA.
[49]
John W. Tukey. 1977. Exploratory data analysis. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.
[50]
Gerard Wagenaar, Sietse Overbeek, and Remko Helms. 2017. Describing Criteria for Selecting a Scrum Tool Using the Technology Acceptance Model. In Intelligent Information and Database Systems, Ngoc Thanh Nguyen, Satoshi Tojo, Le Minh Nguyen, and Bogdan Trawiński (Eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 811--821.
[51]
Claes Wohlin, Martin Höst, and Kennet Henningsson. 2003. Empirical Research Methods in Software Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 7--23.
[52]
Claes Wohlin, Martin Höst, and Kennet Henningsson. 2006. Empirical Research Methods in Web and Software Engineering. In Web Engineering, Emilia Mendes and Nile Mosley (Eds.). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 409--430.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)From Literature to Practice: Exploring Fairness Testing Tools for the Software Industry AdoptionProceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3674805.3695404(549-555)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Choosing the Right Automated Software Testing Tools2024 IEEE 4th International Maghreb Meeting of the Conference on Sciences and Techniques of Automatic Control and Computer Engineering (MI-STA)10.1109/MI-STA61267.2024.10599723(31-35)Online publication date: 19-May-2024
  • (2024)An Empirical Investigation on Android App Testing Practices2024 IEEE 35th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)10.1109/ISSRE62328.2024.00042(355-366)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
EASE '19: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
April 2019
345 pages
ISBN:9781450371452
DOI:10.1145/3319008
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 the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

In-Cooperation

  • IT University of Copenhagen

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 April 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. opinion survey
  2. reliability
  3. software testing tool
  4. tool evaluation

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Funding Sources

  • Business Finland
  • Academy of Finland

Conference

EASE '19

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)37
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 15 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)From Literature to Practice: Exploring Fairness Testing Tools for the Software Industry AdoptionProceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3674805.3695404(549-555)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Choosing the Right Automated Software Testing Tools2024 IEEE 4th International Maghreb Meeting of the Conference on Sciences and Techniques of Automatic Control and Computer Engineering (MI-STA)10.1109/MI-STA61267.2024.10599723(31-35)Online publication date: 19-May-2024
  • (2024)An Empirical Investigation on Android App Testing Practices2024 IEEE 35th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)10.1109/ISSRE62328.2024.00042(355-366)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Why and how bug blocking relations are breakableInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107354166:COnline publication date: 1-Feb-2024
  • (2023)Security Misconfigurations in Open Source Kubernetes Manifests: An Empirical StudyACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/357963932:4(1-36)Online publication date: 26-May-2023
  • (2023)Come for syntax, stay for speed, understand defects: an empirical study of defects in Julia programsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-023-10328-528:4Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
  • (2022)Choosing a Test Automation Framework for Programmable Logic Controllers in CODESYS Development Environment2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW)10.1109/ICSTW55395.2022.00055(277-284)Online publication date: Apr-2022
  • (2022)Improving test automation maturity: A multivocal literature reviewSoftware Testing, Verification and Reliability10.1002/stvr.180432:3Online publication date: 15-Feb-2022
  • (2020)Software Testing Automation: A Comparative Study on Productivity Rate of Open Source Automated Software Testing Tools For Smart Manufacturing2020 IEEE Conference on Open Systems (ICOS)10.1109/ICOS50156.2020.9293650(7-12)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2020
  • (2019)Applying Surveys and Interviews in Software Test Tool EvaluationProduct-Focused Software Process Improvement10.1007/978-3-030-35333-9_2(20-36)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2019

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media