Challenges and guidelines on designing test cases for test bots
This addresses the challenge of improving test bots in large development projects for software practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing automation practices.
The paper tackles the problem of designing effective test cases for automated test bots to prevent increased costs and misleading results, resulting in guidelines for test case design based on a case study.
Test bots are automated testing tools that autonomously and periodically run a set of test cases that check whether the system under test meets the requirements set forth by the customer. The automation decreases the amount of time a development team spends on testing. As development projects become larger, it is important to focus on improving the test bots by designing more effective test cases because otherwise time and usage costs can increase greatly and misleading conclusions from test results might be drawn, such as false positives in the test execution. However, literature currently lacks insights on how test case design affects the effectiveness of test bots. This paper uses a case study approach to investigate those effects by identifying challenges in designing tests for test bots. Our results include guidelines for test design schema for such bots that support practitioners in overcoming the challenges mentioned by participants during our study.