Issn: Agile Testing Practices In Software Quality: State Of The Art Review

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology15th October 2016. Vol.92. No.1 2005 - 2016 JATIT & LLS. All rights reserved.ISSN: 1992-8645www.jatit.orgE-ISSN: 1817-3195Fig. 2. Agile Methodology Matrix 5 conventional method dictates.understand architectural challenges that participatein the adoption of agile approaches and industrialpractices, to be able to develop huge andarchitectural challenging systems. We always willget to the question: Are we creating the rightproduct? This is the moment where validation takespalce, and requires all stockholder participation forrequirement specification and development.Validation is the process of making real tests insource code. Through validation, we guarantee thatour product is designed covering the needs of theclient, monitoring them through a check list usinginspection meetings, comments, documents, toobtain a product that is compliant with the initialobjectives set by stackholders. 27 The project described in 6 is the developmentof a spectrometer using proprietary technology, itreceives a data spectrum and applies a mathematicalcomplex algorithm, sending results to an analysissoftware through an independent communicationlink to a display unit. According to this, agilesoftware testing applied to embedded softwareshow several problems, especially the onesdesigned to test each unit or component becausethey’re related to the communication betweenhardware and software of the system.The proposed and applied solution to the process,was based on the construction of tests whenhardware changes are made, so algorithms werebuilt in Matlab to be executed in parallel along thetest for each module, testing its output and input inthe next module. This way, software was testedbased on its response of each hardware moduleobtaining a highly reliable response with themethodology implemented.4. RESULTS OF ARTICLES REVIEWBased on the set of articles found and filtered, wepresent a list of conclusions:Robert Korošec 5 describes the procedure ofmaking transition from AVL software developmentto the application of agile testing, using theconstruction of a matrix of four quadrants that storeunit testing of the components, functional tests,system acceptance tests and quality system tests.Figure 1 shows this concept.Automation test was implemented, and the taskswere divided among all the team members. Adistribution tool was used for time and resourcesoptimization during the execution of the test,obtaining positive results without the need ofbuilding a huge amount of requirements as theThe research developed by 7 proposes a projectM directed to a commercial system for prepaid cellphones, and the project N with the objective ofproviding flexible billing for prepaid and postpaidof mobile users, based on business rules forprotocols and URL addresses with differences inthe billing for data connections.Several aspects related with applying agiletesting are exposed, especially some issues aboutprogrammers avoiding their responsibility with31

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology15th October 2016. Vol.92. No.1 2005 - 2016 JATIT & LLS. All rights reserved.ISSN: 1992-8645www.jatit.orgsoftware quality, and relying only on testers for it,which it s a problem since testers have no tools tomake changes on the code or either aspects of thesoftware, and also other problems related with teamintegration, even if there was a structured,organized and rigorous planning of the testingstrategy compliant with the SCRUM methodology.They recommend to set and apply integrationstrategies for the team that assigns clear and welldifferenced functions to each member, allowingpermanent interaction between them and avoidingoverlapping actions and skewing informationamong others considerations.E-ISSN: 1817-3195As a remarkable fact, the sprint was executedwith a fixed length of 2 to 6 weeks (varying bycompany) simultaneously with the developmentsprint, and this was beneficial to start the next sprintof the following activity. They obtained a set oflists of actions based on improvements of thesprints, alternated by cycles, and the most amountof requirements was processed to their minimalexpression, daily meetings were held about Scrum,and a discipline for management of reserveinformation was implemented, promoting earlyreuse of information and integration with allprocesses. With this, they obtained a hugeimprovement in software quality in controlled timesaccording to each established strategy.Di Bernardo 8 , references the activities bysoftware developers that give priority to the normalbehavior of applications and won’t emphasize tofind the exception points in the events flow.Applying agile tests, particularly refactoring, it waspossible to fin four errors, two of them unknown fortesters in a production system, checking theexceptional behavior of it, reviewing that the rightpath for exceptions from their starting points totheir destinations were correct. This test allowed tocomplement the proposed approach as an extensionof the Junit framework.The study proposed by 11 analyzed theconclusions of articles previously published aboutthe effects of TDD on quality software, consideringinner and outer factors and the productivity of thecompany that builds the software, and comparingTDD with Development Testing (TLD). Theapplied method consisted in a systematic review ofliterature having articles between 1999 and 2014.The obtained results show that 57% of studiesanalyzed were validated through experimentsapproximately, and 32% of them were validatedthrough study cases.Likewise, analysis concluded that 76% of studieshave shown a significant increase in inner softwarequality, while 88% had an increase of quality inexternal factors of software quality. Also there wasan increment in the number of articles in academicscope, meanwhile in industrial context there hasbeen a huge decrease in it. In general, 44% of thestudies show a lower productivity using TDDcomparing with the higher level domain, so theycan conclude that TDD brings more benefits thanTLD with inner and outer software quality, whichaffects all TLD developers with a lowerproductivity.Agile methodologies are used to handle thechallenges of managing complex projects duringthe development phase. According to Hale 9 research, statistics results from a survey made toexperts in Scrum and Kanban methods to comparetheir efficiency (means are not significantlydifferent at 95% confidence level), showed littledifference, at least to conclude that Scrum would bebetter than Kanba from the analysis of its effects inmanagement factors of software development.Likewise, it suggest that Scrum and Kanban lead tosuccessful projects and Kanban can be better thanScrum in terms of project management, and bothcan be used to handle budget management, riskcontrol, project quality, amount of availableresources, project scope and schedule control.Some of the outstanding results from the researchdeveloped by 12 , come from the automation oftests applying scrum methodology in three differentsoftware: They had a set of problems related withthe methodology scrum, highlighting the old habitof doing regression tests manually. They proposethree different strategies: unit testing automation fortesters and system testing automation for thedevelopment of an API embedded in a modem,using a Google Test tool, according to level Vapplication level referenced in 13 . As final result,they obtained a faster application of testingdetecting code errors, even if no faults were found.The second strategy consisted in the automationThe research proposed in 10 , sets the originalarea of product management as the discipline andintegral actions that regulates a product, solution orservice from start to delivery to the market or client,generating the highest possible value for business.This means that the application of the Scrummethodology to the product management softwareof a refinery, indicating the most relevant aspectswhere stand out identification and structuring whatwill be made based on the vision, theme, conceptsand definition of requirements, which are the sourceof the flow diagram in implemented Scrum.32

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology15th October 2016. Vol.92. No.1 2005 - 2016 JATIT & LLS. All rights reserved.ISSN: 1992-8645www.jatit.orgof a web application for production control in afactory. In this case, a continuous integration testwas applied in sprint 1 and 2 using Hudson opentool. The developers executed TDD tests. Arelevant result was fast feedback received by eachmember of the team of developers and onization in automation, since each workteam used different automation methods.The third strategy was the participation ofdevelopers and testers in automation of unit andsystems tests through 5 sprints. This strategypromotes team harmony, collaboration, knowledgetransfer and fast feedback from sprint results.According to 14 , the idea of using agile testingis to promote radical changes in softwaredevelopment inside organizations, and that’s clearlyevident in software tests. Agile developmentredefines completely the traditional way ofworking. The use of these methodologies removesthe backbone of the software development cycle inmany organizations, including “quality control”.This type of agile practices requires full integrationof tests and development.This proposal obtained results from data analysisat great scale with development projects for anIsraeli aviation company (IAF), and they providenew evidence that agile testing really works andessentially they improve development quality andproductivity. The information system of IAF iscritical for daily operations and informationsecurity. As a result, the objective system is highlycomplex and must have the highest quality.Working with professional testers in agileprojects implies the whole team must test their owncreation. Professional testers add value, not makingmore tests, but rewriting some of the ones made bythe developers and adding new features. They alsocan add better test scenarios, even this can varywidely among them.The use of professional testers proposes two keychallenges for organizations adopting agiledevelopment: bottleneck tests and coordinate testsbetween testers and programmers.Defect management in these kind of projectsconsists in two huge challenges: to control theworkflow and to select and schedule the defects thatwill be solved. The team members check out theirdefects, counting and correcting them as a routine.Workflow management is simpler in agileprojects than traditional ones for three reasons: Any person can visualize a defect. Anyone can close a defect after being fixedand execute the right tests. Anybody that finds a defect can assign whowill repair it.E-ISSN: 1817-3195In 15 , they describe that agile methodologiesare born with one goal in software developmentcommunity, first we would have to talk abouteXtreme Programming (XP) methodology, createdby Kent Beck 16 17 . Currently there aredifferent agile methodologies, and we canenumerate some of them: XP (Extreme Programming): It proposes alight technique of software development,based on the programmer’s discipline.Scrum: Its main focus is project managementpractices on engineering areas. It proposescontinuous adaptation of the projectplanning, using divisions or iterations calledsprints, where each of them produces a newversion of the produce with new features.Crystal Methods: It proposes differentprocesses to apply depending on three basicvariables: project size, criticality, andpriorities of it. Team members set theprocess to follow the entire project. Itemphasizes team communication.DSDM Dynamic Systems DevelopmentMethod: It focuses on RAD (RapidApplication Development) projects, withsingle phase of feasibility and then iterativephases for analysis, design and development.FDD Feature Driven Development: Itproposes to set a series of features that mustbe contained in the product, hierarchicallyorganized, with a scope short enough to beimplemented in a couple of weeks.ASD Adaptive Software Development: Itfocuses on projects . It proposes the phasesspeculate – collaborate – learn to developprojects with these features.Xbreed: Combines management projectpractices from Scrum and XP. It’s quiterecent and there aren’t many referencesabout it.In 18 , the development of big intensive systemsin software is a complex task that must be carriedout applying a divide and conquer strategy.Companies face with the challenge of coordinatingthe individual aspects of software development inparticular, focusing in two principles: RequirementsEngineering (RE) and Software Testing (ST), bothimplied in agile testing software methodologies. Awrong alignment, not only can lead to a wastedeffort, but to faulty software. Nevertheless, beforean organization can improve these aspects, it’snecessary to know coordination mechanisms. When33

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology15th October 2016. Vol.92. No.1 2005 - 2016 JATIT & LLS. All rights reserved.ISSN: 1992-8645www.jatit.orgE-ISSN: 1817-3195practices used in the combination. (2) None of thearchitecture approaches has been widely used incombination. (3) There is a lack of description andanalysis related to costs and the failure stories of thecombination. (4) 20 challenges, 29 factors, and 25learned lessons were identified.The results of this study help to the communityof software engineering to think over the last 13years of research and the practice of combiningarchitecture and its implications with software agilemethodologies.using REST-bench, its goal is to provide anevaluation tool that illustrates coordination insoftware development projects and identifyconcrete improvement opportunities. This tool isdeveloped based on solid foundations of ataxonomy of REST alignment methods, validated infive study cases. The opportunities that wereidentified indicates that the evaluation was effectiveand efficient. On the other hand, participantsconfirmed that their comprehension aboutcoordination between RE and ST improvedsignificantly.5. CONCLUSIONSResearch developed by 19 , wanted tounderstand how software developers experiencecontinuous performance adaptation in a highlyvolatile and modern environment, using thesoftware methodology of Lean and Agile. Thisknowledge can be used as foundation to build andmaintain high performance teams, to communicateperformance improvement initiatives and also getbetter work conditions for developers.As final result, 33 main categories ofperformance factors and relationships between themwere found. A comparison with study casesrevealed similarities and differences between typesand sizes of the organizations.In this study, software teams are committed to apermanent cycle of the interpretation of theiractions and negotiation of the alignment with otherinterested parts of the organization. Certainly, therecan be difference in size among them, a set ofcommon performance experiences is present despitedifferent context variables.Improve the performance experiences requireintegration of soft factors, as communication, teamspirit, team identity, and values in developmentprocess, which suggest a software developmentvision and the performance of an innovativesoftware team is centered in social sciences andbehavior. Based on the analysis of review articles, we canconclude that search must be refined and filteredwith the most number of keywords according to thetopics specialized in software agile testing,otherwise the number of articles would beimpossible to reference through a research of thiskind. The lower amount of articles found are related totools used in automation software testing, whichbrings an open window of opportunities to developnew research in this topic. We advise having in mind other designations forthe search topics, in case of not finding relatedarticles directly with the search objective, this iswhy the context definition is fundamental to refinesearch scope.Based on the articles reviewed we can conclude: Finally, work proposed in 20 , has the objectiveof analyzing the combination of architecture andagile methods with the goal of exploring andanalysis focused in activities and approaches, agilemethods and practices, costs, benefits, factors, toolsand learned lessons comparing with thecombination of the two first ones. As final result, 54studies were included in this research. Some of themost outstanding aspects found were: (1) There is ameaningful difference in the proportion betweenactivities, the agile methods architecture and 34Testing must be executed simultaneouslywith software development, in other words,there must be a team of experts testingcontinuously and not when development isfinished.Agile testing uses continuous feedback,which allows to redirect all the processduring software development.In a team, all members perform direct tests,or any other tests, including users throughalfa o beta versions of the software beingdeveloped.Time for obtaining mistakes and decidingimprovements and corrections is shorterevery time and can be done anytime, sincethis is determined by each iteration in allteams, including the business area. Likewise,the cost of corrections is lower than thosemade at the end of the process of qualityassurance.Each error or errors are corrected in eachiteration after constant testing, obtainingclean code permanently.Testers use checklists to collect essential

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology15th October 2016. Vol.92. No.1 2005 - 2016 JATIT & LLS. All rights reserved.ISSN: 1992-8645 www.jatit.orginformation of the test and any details thataren’t relevant are discarded.Organizations should automate testing foreach software layer.Test should be easy, reusable andunderstandable for each team member.E-ISSN: 1817-3195 8 R. Di Bernardo, F. Castor and S. Soares,"Towards Agile Testing of ExceptionalBehavior,"DependableComputingWorkshops (LADCW), 2011 Fifth LatinAmerican Symposium on, Sao Jose doesCampos,2011,pp.21-24.doi:10.1109/LADCW.2011.12 9 H. Lei, F. Ganjeizadeh, P. K. Jayachandran,and P. Ozcan, “A statistical analysis of theeffects of Scrum and Kanban on softwaredevelopment projects,” Robot. Comput.Integr. Manuf., pp. 1–9, 2015. 10 K. Vlaanderen, S. Jansen, S. Brinkkemper,and E. Jaspers, “The agile requirementsrefinery: Applying SCRUM principles tosoftware product management,” Inf. Softw.Technol., vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 58–70, 2011. 11 W. Bissi, A. G. Serra Seca Neto, and M. C. F.P. Emer, “The effects of test drivendevelopment on internal quality, externalquality and productivity: A systematicreview,” Inf. So

After searching with the keywords: Agile testing software, Scrum agile testing software, Kanban agile testing software, Test Driven Development agile test software, Behavior Driven Development test software, automation test software, the tables 1, 2 and 3 show the number of scientific articles retrieved. This search was made with a restriction