An empirical study to review and revise job responsibilities of software testers

Abstract

The broad domain of software testing includes different job responsibilities such as creating test plans, devising and running a variety of tests, documenting results, to liaising between different development teams. In this paper, we attempt to collate a list of software testing job responsibilities by applying three different social research methodologies to collect information from different sources. We found that “test” specific responsibilities are divided into several unit tasks including test suite generation, execution of test plans, and so on. We also found that along with test specific responsibilities, software testers must perform a number of other tasks common to other IT professionals in order to carry out their roles.