Different Strokes for Different Folks : A Comparison of Developer and Tester Views on Testing

Counsell, Steve and Swift, Stephen and Arzoky, Mahir and Hall, Tracy and Winter, Emily and Bennett, Gareth and Shippey, Thomas (2024) Different Strokes for Different Folks : A Comparison of Developer and Tester Views on Testing. In: Proceedings - 2024 50th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, SEAA 2024 :. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., FRA, pp. 210-213. ISBN 9798350380262

Abstract

In this paper, we re-analyse the data from a previous study of Straubinger et al., which asked 284 industrial IT staff about their views on testing. In that study, as well as developers, the dedicated role of tester was included in the data - both roles were treated as the same role. In this paper, we posit that the two roles (i.e., developer and tester) are so very different that we should analyse each role separately; testers will have unique insights into testing, so separating their views and experiences from developers is important. To this end, we analyse six of the same research questions as the original study, using separate developer and tester data. Results showed that for almost every question we re-visited, testers differed in their opinions from developers, whether on the type of testing they did, measures of code quality, effort to write tests and motivation for testing.