A Process for Identifying Relevant Information for a Repository: A Case Study for Testing Techniques

One major issue in managing software engineering knowledge is the construction of information repositories for software development artifacts (techniques, products, processes, tools, and so on). But how does one package each artifact so that the package contains the appropriate information to understand and use the artifact? What is the appropriate characterization schema? This chapter proposes an empirical and iterative process to identify the information that should be used to characterize a software engineering artifact, using theoretical knowledge, practical experience, and expert opinion to generate a schema. The ultimate goal is to improve the schema and the package contents based upon it experience in their application. The proposed process has been applied to define a characterization schema for testing techniques. Nowadays, there are numerous testing techniques available for generating test cases. However, many of them are never used, while a few are used over and over again. Testers have little (if any) information about the available techniques, their usefulness and, generally, how suited they are to the project at hand. This lack of information means less appropriate decisions on which testing techniques to use. This chapter also shows this characterization schema and discusses the information it contains and why it is included in the schema.