Jingdong Jia

Luiz Fernando Capretz, Pradeep Waychal, Jingdong Jia et al.

This work attempts to fill a gap by exploring the human dimension in particular, by trying to understand the motivation of software professionals for taking up and sustaining their careers as software testers. Towards that goal, four surveys were conducted in four countries - India, Canada, Cuba, and China - to try to understand how professional software engineers perceive and value work-related factors that could influence their motivation to start or move into software testing careers. From our sample of 220 software professionals, we observed that very few were keen to take up testing careers. Some aspects of software testing, such as the potential for learning opportunities and the importance of the job, appear to be common motivators across the four countries, whereas the treatment of testers as second-class citizens and the complexity of the job appeared to be the most prominent de-motivators.

Pradeep Waychal, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Jingdong Jia et al.

As software systems are becoming more pervasive, they are also becoming more susceptible to failures, resulting in potentially lethal combinations. Software testing is critical to preventing software failures but is, arguably, the least understood part of the software life cycle and the toughest to perform correctly. Adequate research has been carried out in both the process and technology dimensions of testing, but not in the human dimensions. This paper attempts to fill in the gap by exploring the human dimension, i.e., trying to understand the motivation of software professionals to take up and sustain testing careers. Towards that end, a survey was conducted in four countries - India, Canada, Cuba, and China - to try to understand how professional software testers perceive and value work-related factors that could influence their motivation to take up and sustain testing careers. With a sample of 220 software professionals, we observed that very few professionals are keen to take up testing careers. Some aspects of software testing, such as the learning opportunities, appear to be a common motivator across the four countries; whereas the treatment meted out to testers as second-class citizens and the complexity of the job appeared to be the most important de-motivators. This comparative study offers useful insights that can help global software industry leaders to come up with an action plan to put the software testing profession under a new light. That could increase the number of software engineers choosing testing careers, which would facilitate quality testing.

Luiz Fernando Capretz, Pradeep Waychal, Jingdong Jia et al.

This paper attempts to understand motivators and de-motivators that influence the decisions of software professionals to take up and sustain software testing careers across four different countries, i.e. Canada, China, Cuba, and India. The research question can be framed as "How many software professionals across different geographies are keen to take up testing careers, and what are the reasons for their choices?" Towards that, we developed a cross-sectional but simple survey-based instrument. In this study we investigated how software testers perceived and valued what they do and their environmental settings. The study pointed out the importance of visualizing software testing activities as a set of human-dependent tasks and emphasized the need for research that examines critically individual assessments of software testers about software testing activities. This investigation can help global industry leaders to understand the impact of work-related factors on the motivation of testing professionals, as well as inform and support management and leadership in this context.

Luiz Fernando Capretz, Pradeep Waychal, Jingdong Jia

Despite its importance, software testing is, arguably, the least understood part of the software life cycle and still the toughest to perform correctly. Many researchers and practitioners have been working to address the situation. However, most of the studies focus on the process and technology dimensions and only a few on the human dimension of testing, in spite of the reported relevance of human aspects of software testing. Testers need to understand various stakeholders explicit and implicit requirements, be aware of how developers work individually and in teams, and develop skills to report test results wisely to stakeholders. These multifaceted qualifications lend vitality to the human dimension in software testing. Exploring this human dimension carefully may help understand testing in a better way.

Jingdong Jia, Luiz Fernando Capretz

User participation is considered an effective way to conduct requirements engineering, but user-developer perception gaps in requirements understanding occur frequently. Since user participation in practice is not as active as we expect and the requirements perception gap has been recognized as a risk that negatively affects projects, exploring whether user-developer perception gaps in requirements understanding will hinder user participation is worthwhile. This will help develop a greater comprehension of the intertwined relationship between user participation and perception gap, a topic that has not yet been extensively examined. This study investigates the direct and mediating influences of user-developer requirements perception gaps on user participation by integrating requirements uncertainty and top management support. Survey data collected from 140 subjects were examined and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results indicate that perception gaps have a direct negative effect on user participation and negate completely the positive effect of top management support on user participation. Additionally, perception gaps do not have a mediating effect between requirements uncertainty and user participation because requirements uncertainty does not significantly and directly affect user participation, but requirements uncertainty indirectly influences user participation due to its significant direct effect on perception gaps. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and limitations and possible future research areas are identified.

Jingdong Jia, Hanlin Mo, Luiz Fernando Capretz et al.

An individual decision-making behavior is heavily influenced by and adapted to external environmental factors. Given that software development is a human-centered activity, individual decision-making behavior may affect the software project quality. Although environmental factors affecting decision-making behavior in software projects have been identified in prior literature, there is not yet an objective and a full taxonomy of these factors. Thus, it is not trivial to manage these complex and diverse factors. To address this deficiency, we first design a semantic similarity algorithm between words by utilizing the synonymy and hypernymy relationships in WordNet. Further, we propose a method to measure semantic similarity between phrases and apply it into k-means clustering algorithm to group these factors. Subsequently, we obtain a taxonomy of the environmental factors affecting individual decision-making behavior in software projects, which includes eleven broad categories, each containing two to five sub-categories. The taxonomy presented herein is obtained by an objective method, and quite comprehensive, with appropriate references provided. The taxonomy holds significant value for researchers and practitioners; it can help them to better understand the major aspects of environmental factors, also to predict and guide the behavior of individuals during decision making towards a successful completion of software projects.

Jingdong Jia, Pengnan Zhang, Luiz Fernando Capretz

As one of the crucial human aspects, individual decision-making behavior that may affect the quality of a software project is adaptive to the environment in which the individual is. However, no comprehensive reference framework of the environmental factors influencing individual decision-making behavior in software projects is presently available. This paper undertakes a systematic literature review (SLR) to gain insight into existing studies on this topic. After a careful SLR process, 40 studies were targeted to solve this question. Based on these extracted studies, we first provided a taxonomy of environmental factors comprising eight categories. Then a total of 237 factors are identified and classified using these eight categories, and some major environmental factors of each category are listed in the paper. The environmental factors listing and the taxonomy can help researchers and practitioners to better understand and predict the behavior of individuals during decision making and to design more effective solutions to improve people management in software projects.