qEstimation: a process for estimating size and effort of software testing

Software testing is an essential activity of the software development lifecycle. To ensure quality, applicability, and usefulness of a product, development teams must spend considerable time and resources testing, which makes the estimation of the software testing effort, a critical activity. This paper describes a simple process, which we name qEstimation, to estimate the size and effort of the software testing activities. The process incorporates a proposed approach to measuring the size of the test case based on its checkpoints, preconditions and test data, as well as the type of testing. To investigate the practicality of the process, we apply it to estimate the size and effort of two outsourcing testing projects at a software company. In these projects, the estimates produced by the process are more accurate than those estimated by individual testers using their pure experience. This result indicates that our approach can be useful to estimating similar testing projects in practice.