SPt: A Text Mining Process to Extract Relevant Areas from SW Documents to Exploratory Tests

Abstract

Software products must show high-quality levels to succeed in a competitive market. Usually, products reliability is assured by testing activities. However, SW testing is sometimes neglected by Companies due to its high costs - particularly when manually executed. In this light, this work investigates intelligent methods for SW testing automation, focusing on the software products review process. We propose a new process for test plan creation based on the inspection of SW documents (in particular, Release Notes) using text mining techniques. The implemented prototype, the SWAT Plan tool (SPt), automatically extracts from Release Notes relevant areas of the SW to be examined by exploratory tests teams. SPt was tested using real-world data from Motorola Mobility, our partner Company. The experiments compared the current manual process with the automated process using SPt, accessing time spent and relevant areas identified in both methods. The obtained results were very encouraging.