Automatização de testes em equipes ágeis: um estudo qualitativo usando teoria fundamentada.

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of agile practices, test activities must adapt to agility in special test automation and anticipated implementation of requirements. Based on this, typically the automation of system tests for web, desktop and mobile applications is largely used to improve software quality, allowing for more frequent testing, when compared to manual execution. However, the maintainance cost of automated tests is high, and teams normally do not have specialized people in test automation. Therefore, the literature lacks reports related to the gaps that prevent the use of the advantages offered by the system testing automation in its fullness in agile teams. This work, through an empirical study with semi-structured interviews and the Fundamentated Theory, aims to collect and to analyze data about practices used in agile teams in the system testing automation to list practices that indicate the best moment to start the creation of the system test automation scripts. In addition, it seeks to contribute to the literature and consequently a theoretical basis, so that suggestions for improvements can be made in the future. The collected data allowed us to identify system testing automation practices used in typical agile teams, such as starting the creation of automated test scripts after some manual executions of the test cases, until the functional requirement becomes stable; the activities of creationing automatic test scripts should be planned to start from the features that have the manual test cases executed in the previous Sprint; and the management of the changes requested by the client to replanning quickly if the request causes a major impact on the features in validation status. To structure the obtained results, the principles of the Grounded Theory were used through the analysis of the interviews conducted for data collection.