An Empirical Study on the Ability Relationships Between Programming and Testing

Under the software quality management mechanism, developers are generally required to review and test their own code firstly to ensure that the submitted code meets specific quality standards. At the same time, with the popularity of test-driven development (TDD) and extreme programming (XP), programming and testing are complementary in the process of software development, i.e., software testing has become as important as programming. Despite its importance, there is no empirical study that investigates the ability relationships between programming and testing. This article presents such a study, where we designed software tasks to investigate the ability of programming and testing. We distributed the program tasks to software vocational students and analyzed the results from multiple dimensions. Our main findings show that (i) almost half of the developers with strong programming ability do not have a good testing ability; (ii) some developers with weak programming ability can do well in testing; (iii) compared with programming ability, testing fundamentals have a greater impact on the testing ability; and (iv) most developers can do well at finding bugs but lack experience in writing test scripts.