Test Case Quality Factors: Content Analysis of Software Testing Websites

Abstract

Software testing is anessential process for ensuring thequality and reliability of software products. The efficiency of testing activities depends largely on the test case quality, which is considered as one of the major concerns of software testing. Unfortunately, at the moment there is no clear guideline that can be referred by software testers in producing good quality test cases. Hence, producing guideline is certainly required. To construct a pragmatic guideline, it is crucial to identify the factors that lead todesigninggood quality test cases. The existing test case quality factors are not comprehensive and need further investigation and improvement. Therefore, a content analysis was conducted to identify the test case qualityfactors from software testing experts point of view available in the software testing websites. The software testing websites provide explicit information about the quality of test cases in order to avoid the poor design of test cases. Thus, this study presents the outcomes of content analysis from 22 software testing websites which comprise of static content websites and blogs. Consequently, eight (8)factors and their corresponding 30 sub-factors were identified. Among the factors are documentation, manageability, maintainability, reusability, requirement quality, efficiency, tester knowledge, and effectiveness of test cases. These factors are useful to be referred by the practitioners in assuring the quality of the design test cases which implicitly can ensure the quality of the software products.