Tester Experience: Concept, Issues and Definition

Testing is a very essential activity for software development. It is the act of executing a software product in order to validate whether it behaves as intended and identify possible malfunctions. Studies have shown that testing makes up more than 50% of the development cost. Besides, much effort and emphasis have now been placed on tasks related to automation with the purpose of reducing cost and the participation of the human element in software testing activities. Testing is still a human-based activity. Therefore, efficient ways of testing software products for quality assurance will require a better and more comprehensive understanding of testers' feelings, perceptions and motivations, in this paper referred to as Tester Experience (TX). Thus, the better the tester's experience during the software testing process, the better the result. TX can be defined as a means of capturing how testers think and feel about their activities within the software testing environment, with the assumption that an improvement of the tester's experience has positive impact on quality assurance. This paper motivates the importance of TX, highlights related approaches from other domains, proposes a definition based on similar concepts in other domains, and proposes future research activities.