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EuroSTAR Conference

Europe's Largest Quality Engineering Conference

Track Talk W11

Test Intelligence: How to Find More Bugs in Less Time

Elmar Juergens

13:45-14:45 Wednesday 12th June

Software grows with every release. At the same time, release cycles get shorter and shorter. As testers, we thus face the challenge to test more and more functionality in less and less time.

Unfortunately, our historically grown test suites are often unhelpful, since they test too much and too little at the same time. Too much, since they contain redundant tests that incur execution and maintenance costs but provide little value over similar tests. And too little, because we lack tests for important functionality in changed or new code.

Instead of doing more and more work in less and less time, our tests are, thus, costly and slow while still letting too many bugs slip into production.

In order to solve this challenge, we need to stop treating our testing efforts like a black box. Instead, as our conference motto suggests, we need to better understand what we are doing here, and act accordingly.

In this talk, I will demonstrate how data from our own test and development process shed light into this black box and allow us to both optimize our tests and align them with development activities: test gap analysis reveals which code changes have not yet been tested by neither automated nor manual tests. Pareto optimization of test suites and Test impact analysis identify the tests that most quickly find remaining bugs. And history analyses of the version control system show where the most bugs occurred in the past, potentially revealing fundamental process issues that we need to fix.

For each analysis, I outline the research foundation and its limitations. I give examples and experiences from practical applications in different domains, and show how they helped teams to find more bugs in less time.

What you will learn

  1. Our development processes are a trove of data that can be very valuable to us as testers. Many teams don't use it, since they don't know how. But there are low hanging fruits (like investigating clusters of bugs fixed in the past) that are quick wins
  2. Test intelligence analyses apply to manual tests as much as to automated tests. For manual tests, selecting the right ones to find new bugs, and ordering them in such a way to find new bugs quickly, is even more useful than for automated tests
  3. Test intelligence analyses offer a whole box of tools. Often several ones for the same task (e.g. selecting the tests that find new bugs quickly). Some are cheaper, some are more expensive to apply, and offer better results. All have their place in practice

Session Details

  • Introductory
  • 1 Hour
  • Includes 20mins Discussion
  • Experience, exploration & experimentation
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Check out this video from Elmar Juergens to hear more about his talk, ‘Test Intelligence: How to Find More Bugs in Less Time‘.

We look forward to welcoming you to EuroSTAR 2024.

Session Speaker

Headshot of EuroSTAR 2024 Speaker Elmar Juergen

Elmar Juergens

Founder – CQSE, Germany

Elmar works both as a researcher and a founder. Elmar wrote his PhD thesis on static code analysis and is still active as a researcher in software quality analysis. In 2009, he co-founded CQSE GmbH, and since then helps teams in using analysis tools more effectively. Elmar frequently talks at research conferences (e.g. ICSE, ICPC) and industry events (e.g. GTD, OOP, JAX). He was elected best speaker at Clean Code Days, Software Quality Days and Java Forum Stuttgart. Elmar was named Junior Fellow of the GI in 2015.

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