Improving software testing process: feature prioritization to make winners of success-critical stakeholders

For a successful software project, acceptable quality must be achieved within an acceptable cost, demonstrating business value to customers and satisfactorily meeting delivery timeliness. Testing serves as the most widely used approaches to determine that the intended functionalities are performed correctly and achieve the desired level of services; however, it is also a labor-intensive and expensive process during the whole software life cycle. Most current testing processes are often technique-centered, rather than organized to maximize business value. In this article, we extend and elaborate the 4+1 theoretical lenses of Value-based Software Engineering (VBSE) framework in the software testing process; propose a multi-objective feature prioritization strategy for testing planning and controlling, which aligns the internal testing process with value objectives coming from customers and markets. Our case study in a real-life business project shows that this method allows reasoning about the software testing process in different dimensions: it helps to manage the testing process effectively and efficiently, provides information for continuous internal software process improvement, and increases customer satisfaction, which makes winners of all success-critical stakeholders (SCSs) in the software testing process. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.