Abstract
This thesis seeks to determine the skills that employers expect of software testers and evaluate these requirements in relation to testers' role performance. We found five specialties within the testing role. Due to the effective application of skills, the testers preferred to work in a single specialty. At the same time, the majority of businesses expected the testers to possess a wide range of hard and soft abilities, and to specialize in several testing areas concurrently. As such, there is a disparity between the employers' requirements and the testers' capacity to perform the job. Businesses are advised to take into account the number and specificity of roles they require from testers.
List of papers
Paper I: Software tester, we want to hire you! Raluca Florea and Viktoria Stray. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP), Porto, Portugal, 2018, Springer, pp.54-67, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-91602-6_4. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91602-6_4 |
Paper II: The skills that employers look for in software testers. Raluca Florea and Viktoria Stray. Journal article, Springer, Software Quality Journal 27 (2019): 1449-1479. DOI: 10.1007/s11219-019-09462-5. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-019-09462-5 |
Paper III: A global view on the hard skills and testing tools in software testing. Raluca Florea and Viktoria Stray. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE), Montreal, QC, Canada, 2019, ACM/IEEE, pp. 143-151, DOI: 10.1109/ICGSE.2019.00035. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2019.00035 |
Paper IV: A Qualitative Study of the Background, Skill Acquisition, and Learning Preferences of Software Testers Raluca Florea and Viktoria Stray. In Proceedings of the EASE ’20: Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, Trondheim, Norway, 2020, ACM, pp. 299-305, DOI: 10.1145/3383219.3383252. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3383219.3383252 |
Paper V: Exploring Human Factors of the Agile Software Tester. Viktoria Stray, Raluca Florea, and Lucas Paruch. Journal article, Springer, Software Quality Journal (2021), DOI: 10.1007/s11219-021-09561-2. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-021-09561-2 |
Paper VI: On the Roles of Software Testers: An Exploratory Study. Raluca Florea, Viktoria Stray and Dag Sjøberg. Journal article under submission to the Journal of Systems and Software, 2022. To be published. The paper is not available in DUO awaiting publishing. |