Practices and Tools for Better Software Testing

Presenter: Davide Spadini
Date: 05 December 2018

Abstract

Automated testing has become an essential process for improving the quality of software systems. In fact, testing can help to point out defects and to ensure that production code is robust under many usage conditions. However, writing and maintaining high-quality test code is challenging and frequently considered of secondary importance. Managers, as well as developers, do not treat test code as equally important as production code, and this behaviour could lead to poor test code quality, and in the future to defect-prone production code. The goal of my research is to bring awareness to developers on the effect of poor testing, as well as helping them in writing better test code. To this aim, I am working on 2 different perspectives: (1) studying best practices on software testing, identifying problems and challenges of current approaches, and (2) building new tools that better support the writing of test code, that tackle the issues we discovered with previous studies.