TX-A: uma abordagem para melhora a experiência do testador em projetos de software

Abstract

Testing is a very essential activity for software development. It is the act of executing a software product in order to validate whether it behaves as intended and identify possible malfunctions. Studies have shown that testing makes up more than 50% of the development cost. Besides, much effort and emphasis have now been placed on tasks related to automation with the purpose of reducing cost and the participation of the human element in software activities. Testing is a human-based activity. Therefore, efficient ways of testing software products for quality assurance will require a better and more comprehensive understanding of testers’ feelings, perceptions, and motivations, referred to as Tester Experience (TX). Thus, the better the TX of developers during testing, or anyone who takes up the role of a tester, the better the result. TX can be defined as a means of capturing how testers think and feel about their activities within the software testing environment, with the assumption that an improvement of the tester’s experience has a positive impact on quality assurance. This thesis motivates the importance of TX, proposes concepts, issues, definition and factors affecting TX. It also proposes an approach, namely, the Tester ExperienceBased Approach (TX-A), composed of guidelines and activities that developers (or testers) can follow in order to improve their TX in addition to the factors affecting TX. Moreover, this work presents the results of a survey carried out with software development practitioners in order to evaluate TX-A which evaluates the importance of the factors and the relevance of the guidelines in improving TX. The results obtained show that more than 95% of participants agree that the factors are important and the guidelines relevant for improving TX.