Analysis of software test item generation - comparison between high skilled and low skilled engineers

Recent software systems contain a lot of functions to provide various services. According to this tendency, it is difficult to ensure software quality and to eliminate crucial faults by conventional software testing methods. Especially, in the conventional method, the detail level of test items are widely varied, according to the engineers´ skill, and this causes an immature software quality. In this paper, we discuss the effects of test engineer skill on test item generation, and propose a new test item generation method, that enables the generation of test items for illegal behavior of the system. The proposed method can generate test items based on use-case analysis, deviation analysis for legal behavior, and fault tree analysis for system fault situations. From the result of the experimental applications, we confirmed that test items for illegal behavior of the system were effectively generated, and also the proposed method could effectively assist test item generation by poorly skilled engineers.