Forming Consensus on Testability in Software Developing Organizations

Testing is an important activity in all software development projects and organizations. Therefore, it is important that all parts of the organization have the same view on testing and testability of software components and systems. In this paper we study the view on testability by software engineers, software testers, and managers, using a questionnaire followed by interviews. The questionnaire also contained a set of software metrics that the respondents grade based on their expected impact on testability. We find, in general, that there is a high consensus within each group of people on their view on testability. Further, we have identified that the software engineers and the testers mostly have the same view, but that their respective views differ on how much the coupling between modules and the number of parameters to a module impact the testability. Base on the grading of the software metrics we conclude that size and complexity metrics could be complemented with more specific metrics related to memory management operations.