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

Open-Source Software (OSS) projects result from contributions from people with all skill levels. Software development is a collaborative, social, knowledge-intensive activity, and human-centered (human aspects) factors such as communication and personality can impact software projects. These factors are essential for team diversity. There are three types of team diversity: informational (or knowledge), social, and values diversity. In this context, we have noticed that there’s a lot of interest in the software engineering community about the relationship between human factors and code quality. It is impor- tant to investigate if knowledge diversity (human aspects) affect test code quality. The literature has brought a number of studies investigating test code quality, but there is just a few empirical evidence on effects of knowledge diversity (e.g., educational background, level of professional experience, expertise, and skills) and test code quality. Whether we consider the prevalence of test smells in current software testing research, the number is way more limited. Test smells are bad implementations inserted by developers and can harm the comprehensibility and maintainability of test suites. Recent studies discuss developers’ perceptions of test smells and their impact on quality improvement, yet they have yet to discuss the effects of knowledge diversity in this regard. Our goal is to gather empirical evidence on such a relationship, with particular attention on the effect test smells can bring to software quality To achieve our goal, we adopted a combination of several research methods (e.g., surveys, interviews, and mining of GitHub repositories) to understand knowledge diversity and test code quality better. Analyzing the data from this combination of methods will lead us to compile a set of guidelines that will serve to support developers in preventing the insertion of test smells during the creation of unit test case