Design and Development of a Technology-Agnostic NFR Testing Framework: Introducing the framework and discussing the future of load testing in Agile software development

Abstract

Testing the non-functional requirements (NFR) of a system is particularly complicated and time-consuming. Challenges in this area are compounded when the system is developed under some offspring of Agile methodologies, which favor iterative development and rapid feedback from extensive testing. The authors of this paper build upon previous work investigating the common challenges and solutions cited in recent peer-reviewed research on this topic to design and build a tool consolidating many of the concepts found in this investigation. The tool is known as LuluPerfTest (LPT) and is an NFR testing framework meant to plug into continuous integration (CI) systems to run NFR tests configured with a JSON script. This allows developers and testers to build maintainable and minimally complex automated NFR test scripts. This study explains the challenges inherent in NFR testing in Agile software development and presents how LPT confronts those challenges. It aims to explain LPT and invite collaboration among other testing, verification, and validation researchers to create an open sources software (OSS) solution to the problems of NFR testing in Agile software development projects.