Understanding the effect of human aspects on the quality of the test code

Open-Source Software results from contributions from people with all skill levels. Contributions have distinct and fundamental roles in software development. Recent studies investigate developers’ contributions (human factors) and their influence on software quality. Human aspects play an essential role in software quality. OSS projects are still produced in high quality, yet designer problems can occur. These problems are called test smells. Test smells are bad implementations or problems in the design of test code. One of the problems caused by test smells is the comprehension of test suites. Some authors have carried out studies on the developer’s perception of test smells, but the studies did not focus on the human aspects, only on how developers look at test smells. There are several studies on the quality of the test code in the literature, but there is limited empirical evidence on studies investigating the relationship between human aspects and the quality of the test code from the perspective of test smells. The goal is to conduct a family of empirical studies to investigate the relationship between human aspects and test code quality from the perspective of test smells. We will approach two methodologies based on data mining and survey/Interview study. As a result, the approach will build a guideline containing best testing practices for preventing test smells in test code