Towards cognitive support for unit testing: A qualitative study with practitioners

Unit testing is an important component of software quality improvement. Several researchers proposed automated tools to improve this activity over the years. However, these research efforts have not been sufficient to help the practitioners to address some associated mental tasks. Motivated by this gap, we conducted a qualitative study of professionals with unit testing experience. The goal was to understand how to improve the cognitive support provided by the testing tools, by considering the practitioners' perspective on their unit testing review practices. We obtained the responses from our volunteers through a questionnaire composed both of open-ended and closed questions. Our results revealed some primary tasks which require cognitive support, including monitoring of pending and executed unit testing tasks, and navigating across unit testing related artifacts. We summarize our results in a framework, and based on it, we develop a research agenda as an actionable instrument to the community. Our study's contributions comprise practical improvement suggestions for the current tools and describe further opportunities for research in software testing. Moreover, we comprehensively explain our qualitative methods.