Hardware Reference
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on software testing practices in Spain were launched in 1999 by L. Fernandez-Sanz. It
began with a survey on testing practices in organizations (see Section 2) which finally
collected information from 210 software professionals. After analyzing results which
reveal a weak situation for organizations and as suggested by respondents, a specific
study on 72 individual practitioners' performance in test case design (see Section 3) was
carried out to control if professionals might get good results despite poor organizational
environment. This study concluded that individual performance was also weak so as a
final step a survey was launched to discover the underlying causes. This paper is fo-
cused on this final stage presented in Section 4 although a brief presentation of the two
first studies is included in Sections 2 and 3. Finally, section 5 discusses results and con-
clusions as well as future works.
2 Analysis of Testing Practices in Organizations
In order to know something more about which the real testing practices of software
organizations in Spain are, a study was carried out by the Software Quality Group of
ATI (www.ati.es), the main computing professionals association in Spain, the national
body of CEPIS (www.cepis.org), the Council of European Professional Informatics
Societies. This study (partly published in [5]) collected, during the period 1999-2007
information, from 210 IT professionals engaged in software development projects in
Spain corresponding to almost all the activity sectors as well as many different posi-
tions (see table 1). Data were collected using anonymous questionnaires during spe-
cific events (like training courses, both in-company and open access, and QA events)
as well as exploiting direct relations with IT professionals in companies.
Table 1.
Respondents in the study of testing practices in organizations
Sector
%
Position
%
Finance
14.3%
Tester
16.2%
Consultancy
12.8%
Analyst
12.8%
Telco/IT
10.4%
Project manager
11.1%
Energy/industry
5.2%
Manager
9.4%
Transportation/Airlines 4.3%
Software engineer
8.5%
Defense
4.3%
QA specialist
5.9%
Government
3.8%
Programmer
5.9%
Tourism
3.8%
IT director
5.1%
Health
2.3%
Others
25.1%
Others 38.8%
Although different process models (such as CMMi
1
[6][7],TMM [8], TMMI
[9][10], TPI [11] y TMap [12][13].) are applicable to testing and include specific
practices, only recently [14] description for testing process improvement have been
analyzed in a rigorous way. Conclusions of this study reflect that there is not a com-
plete and well described set of practices in those models so a quick method to collect
1
As stated in the areas of Product Integration, Validation and Verification.
