Towards Automated Test Practice Detection and Governance

The selection, monitoring, and adjustment of quality measures are fundamental to software engineering, and testing is a key quality assurance activity. In Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), it is often difficult and time consuming to manually ascertain the degree and type of test practice usage and related process compliance, thus such data collection may be omitted. Moreover, any manual data collection may not be objective, comprehensive, and dependable, since manual collection cannot typically be done transparently with software engineers. Considering test-driven development, the intention and the order of programming are important, and few clues are left ex post that can be objectively verified. This paper presents an approach that enables an automatic test practice detection capability using the SEEEK (Software Engineering Environment Event-driven framework) to support adaptable processes while ensuring process compliance and supporting governance. The results show the feasibility of this approach for automatically detecting test practices and adjusting developer task management accordingly.