Using Defect Taxonomies to Improve the Maturity of the System Test Process: Results from an Industrial Case Study SpringerLink

Section 3 follows with the rationale for revising existing usability defect classification schemes in open source software development. Section 4 explains the research process and methodology to construct the taxonomy. In Section 5, we elaborate our new usability defect classification model. We present our https://www.globalcloudteam.com/glossary/defect-taxonomy/ approach to evaluate the model in Section 6, and the evaluation results are presented in Section 7 and Section 8, respectively. We outline threats to validity in Sections 9 and we discuss some important issues in Section 10. The paper concludes with a summary, implications, and future work in Section 11.

Other recent studies aimed to automate the refactoring of model transformation programs, mostly focusing on the ATLAS Transformation Language , by improving mainly few quality metrics using a number of refactoring types. Taxonomies are useful starting points for our testing but they are certainly not a complete answer to the question of where to start testing. One of the first defect taxonomies was defined by Boris Beizer in Software Testing Techniques. We validate our approach on a comprehensive dataset of model transformations.

The Usability of Free / Libre / Open Source Projects

Testing can be done without the use of taxonomies or with a taxonomy to guide the design of test cases. We apply WCA to a wide range of benchmarks, including real-world ones and synthetic ones. The results show that WCA achieves a significant improvement over three state-of-the-art competitors in 2-way and 3-way CCAG, in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.

Then modify it to more accurately reflect your particular situation in terms of defects, their frequency of occurrence, and the loss you would incur if these defects were not detected and repaired. A total of 41 evaluators from 26 to 55 years of age participated in the evaluation of the OSUDC taxonomy. As shown in Table 5, most of the evaluators are computing students and academic researchers, accounting for 48.8% and 29.3%, respectively. Almost 80% of the evaluators had received training or certification related to usability evaluation/ HCI/ UX. However, as indicated in Table 6, the majority of evaluators had limited familiarity in handling usability defects.

What are Defect Taxonomies?

One way to reduce this limitation is to create a set of predefined impact attributes so that the impact can be objectively measured. For example, we can use rating scale to measure emotion, while task difficulty could be selected from a predefined set of attributes. Causal – Since no formal usability evaluation is usually conducted in OSS projects, usability problem triggers cannot be identified.

• The importance of weighting is also reflected by the experimental comparison between WCA and its alternative algorithm without the weighting mechanism.
• If they are used in similar circumstances, an additional benefit to having a taxonomy is that later on, test cases can be built on them.
• Considering this limitation, instead of looking at trigger attributes, we study the failure qualifier of the problem.
• Model transformations play a fundamental role in Model-Driven Engineering as they are used to manipulate models and to transform them between source and target metamodels.
• The general goal of a defect taxonomy is to reduce the number of product defects that reach customers.
• Although Geng et al. agreed that CUP can capture important usability defect information and provide feedback for usability software, CUP could not be used to analyse the effect on users and task performance.

Note how this taxonomy could be used to guide both inspections and test case design. Binder also references specific defect taxonomies for C++, Java, and Smalltalk. In software test design we are primarily concerned with taxonomies of defects, ordered lists of common defects we expect to encounter in our testing. Each of these characteristics and subcharacteristics suggest areas of risk and thus areas for which tests might be created. An evaluation of the importance of these characteristics should be undertaken first so that the appropriate level of testing is performed.

Project Level Taxonomies

Model transformations play a fundamental role in Model-Driven Engineering as they are used to manipulate models and to transform them between source and target metamodels. However, model transformation programs lack significant support to maintain good quality which is in contrast to established programming paradigms such as object-oriented programming. In order to improve the quality of model transformations, the majority of existing studies suggest manual support for the developers to execute a number of refactoring types on model transformation programs.

Andre et al. have expanded the UPT to include other usability engineering support methods and tools. By adapting and extending Norman’s theory of action model, they developed Usability Action Framework that used different interaction styles. For example, the high-level planning and translation phase contains all cognitive actions for users to understand the user work goals, task and intentions, and how to perform them with physical actions. The physical action phase is about executing tasks by manipulating user interface objects, while the assessment phase includes user feedback and the user’s ability to assess the effectiveness of physical actions outcome.

Classification and prioritization of usability problems using an augmented classification scheme

One of the most prominent approaches is the adoption of a cause-effect model. In Pre-CUP, usability evaluators use nine attributes to describe usability defects in detail. Once the usability defects have been fixed, the developers record four attributes in Post-CUP. For example, technical information about defect removal activity, failure qualifier, expected phase, and frequency are difficult to obtain, especially for those who have limited usability-technical knowledge. In Section 2, we describe an overview of usability defect classification schemes from the usability and software engineering disciplines.

Usability engineering needs to make it feasible to be used in open source software development. The use of the taxonomy has been validated on five real cases of usability defects. However, evaluation results using the OSUDC were only moderately successful. Several other related work support usability-related issues by focusing on GUI defects and functionality. Khajouei et al. argued that the lack of information on the effects of usability defects in UAF will cause a long discussion to convince developers of the validity of the usability defects.

Defect taxonomy

A defect taxonomy is a method of gathering indications of problem areas. Covering array generation is the core task of Combinatorial interaction testing , which is widely used to discover interaction faults in https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ real-world systems. Considering the universality, constrained covering array generation is more in line with the characteristics of applications, and has attracted a lot of researches in the past few years.

But, if a user experiences the slowness of retrieving the search results and is frustrated by a delay, in addition to performance it also affects usability. Just as in other disciplines like biology, psychology, and medicine, there is no one, single, right way to categorize, there is no one right software defect taxonomy. What matters is that we are collecting, analyzing, and categorizing our past experience and feeding it forward to improve our ability to detect defects. Taxonomies are merely models and, as George Box, the famous statistician, reminds us, “All models are wrong; some models are useful.” Now that we have examined a number of different defect taxonomies, the question arises—which is the correct one for you? The taxonomy that is most useful is your taxonomy, the one you create from your experience within your organization.

Improvement of Open Source Software Usability: an Empirical Evaluation from Developers’ Perspective

At the same time, we also used the card-sorting technique to group defects that could not be classified using UPT. We looked for commonalities and similarities to further group the defects within each category as well as across categories. The book Testing Computer Software contains a detailed taxonomy consisting of over 400 types of defects.