Communicating software testing culture through visualizing testing activity

Abstract

Inexperienced developers, for example new graduates joining a software development company, have difficulties applying their software testing knowledge. They lack hands-on experience and often have a dismissive attitude towards systematic testing, which hinders their adoption of testing activities. If the novice cannot quickly adopt a healthy testing culture during the onboarding phase, her progress as a high-quality engineer may be hindered. Here, cues from social coding sites can potentially help: Simple signs of a team’s testing culture can facilitate more testing by contributors. We propose to make the team’s testing culture visible by strategically employing traits of social transparency. We introduce six dashboard-like testing signals into the novice’s IDE and prominently display how senior developers are testing. A preliminary evaluation with 24 soon-to-be Bachelor graduates showed encouraging results: Being reminded of their lagging test progress induced a need to test more. Visual comparison to colleagues’ testing performance woke competitive feelings in students and made them want to write more test.