On the Identification of Best Practices for Improving the Efficiency of Testing Activities in Distributed Software Projects: Preliminary Findings from an Empirical Study

Testing aims at identifying whether the software product attends its specification and the customer needs. It is a collaborative task since it requires coordination and communication of activities with those responsible for defining the project scope and for developing the source-code in order to clarify requirements, to stay up-to-date about changes, and to coordinate working schedule. It is a challenging but necessary activity in any software development life cycle. Distribution exacerbates the difficulties faced by testing team members. This paper presents empirical exploratory preliminary findings on challenges faced by testing teams in distributed projects and discusses best practices adopted by such teams to facilitate coordination and, as a consequence, increase the efficiency of their work. Our findings suggest corroboration of preliminary literature that focuses mainly in requirements engineering and in development activities. We aim to replicate our investigation in a larger scale. Meanwhile, our work provides initial contributions to practitioners and inspires our future research.

I. Introduction

Testing is performed to evaluate and improve product quality by identifying defects. Software testing consists of the dynamic verification of a program's behavior on a finite set of test cases suitably selected from the usually infinity executions domain, against the expected behavior [1]. It can be performed at different levels—unit, integration and system, along the development life cycle and can focus on different aspects such as purpose, use, behavior, or structure of the system.