Effective Testing: A case study approach for improving test efficiency

Effective Testing: A case study approach for improving test efficiency

The study presented in this thesis investigates the methods for improving the software test efficiency. Test efficiency measures the cost-effectiveness of a test organisation and it is measured by dividing the number of defects found in a test by the effort needed to perform the test. A review of the literature suggests that software test efficiency improvement depends on direct and indirect success factors like test process, test management, test tools, test object delimitation, test case determination, test infrastructure, configuration management, release management etc. This thesis was a case study approach for improving the test efficiency of an existing test setup in a database environment. Most of the thesis work followed an action based research approach by giving importance to the test setup. Work started with an analysis of the initial test environment, identified the issues and improvement areas in existing test setup and given an implementation proposal for the identified problems. Based on the proposal, team implemented the solutions, which lead to a test environment containing number of actions like automation using standard framework, risk based testing, parallel execution, modularization, avoiding code redundancy and proper test management. The results of the case study suggest that the software products that has multiple releases should seriously consider the test improvement factors like regression environment, risk based testing, light weight test automation etc., in the initial stages of the testing. This will lead to cost savings, quality, flexibility and higher productivity. The investigation further identifies the issues in test management and introduced new method called test point method for proper test execution tracking. Based on the implementation results and their discussions, this study presents a new approach and practical guidelines for improving test efficiency of a software test project. IBM has recognised this case study by giving eminence and excellence award for saving one person year of testing effort in their indexing tool test environment.

Rauf E.M Abdul

Computer Science