Test-Case Quality -- Understanding Practitioners' Perspectives

TL;DR

This study explores how practitioners perceive and assess test-case quality, revealing an 11-attribute quality model and highlighting differences between industry and academic perspectives.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive quality model based on practitioner insights and identifies misalignments between industry practices and academic definitions.

Findings

Practitioners' background influences quality assessment.

An 11-attribute test-case quality model was developed.

Differences exist between industry and academic views on quality.

Abstract

Background: Test-case quality has always been one of the major concerns in software testing. To improve test-case quality, it is important to better understand how practitioners perceive the quality of test-cases. Objective: Motivated by that need, we investigated how practitioners define test-case quality and which aspects of test-cases are important for quality assessment. Method: We conducted semi-structured interviews with professional developers, testers and test architects from a multinational software company in Sweden. Before the interviews, we asked participants for actual test cases (written in natural language) that they perceive as good, normal, and bad respectively together with rationales for their assessment. We also compared their opinions on shared test cases and contrasted their views with the relevant literature. Results: We present a quality model which consists of 11 test-case quality attributes. We also identify a misalignment in defining test-case quality among practitioners and between academia and industry, along with suggestions for improving test-case quality in industry. Conclusion: The results show that practitioners' background, including roles and working experience, are critical dimensions of how test-case quality is defined and assessed.