Software Testing Fundamentals: Methods and Metrics

The respondents who were not actively testing provided the most accurate definitions of the testing terms. The people performing the testing supplied the poorest definitions of the testing tasks that they were performing most frequently.

Respondents from the United Kingdom scored much higher than the U.S. respondents in the definition of testing tasks. They had more science and engineering education than respondents from the United States. They used more automation tools, but they did not use significantly more metrics than their counterparts in the United States.

Few respondents reported using formal methods such as inspection or structured analysis, meaning some documented structured or systematic method of analyzing the test needs of a system The most commonly cited reason for attending the seminar was to learn some software testing methods.

The only type of metrics used regularly had to do with counting bugs and ranking them by severity. Only a small percentage of respondents measured the bug-find rate or the bug-fix rate. No other metrics were widely used in development or test, even among the best educated and seemingly most competent testers. It could also be inferred from these results that the companies for which these testers worked did not have a tradition of measuring their software development or test processes.

Survey respondents rated the methods and metrics in this book as valuable and doable.