Topic Analysis on Popular Software Testing Books

Mining Software Testing Knowledge

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Abstract

In this study, we try to understand what kind of topics and frameworks are covered by the popular software testing books, and see whether these topics satisfy the industry needs and address the rising trends. To define "popular" software testing books, we formulated three heuristics. The topics of the books are analyzed through LDA topic modelling and manual inspection. LDA results inform us on the dominance of the topics within the whole corpus, while the manual inspection results show how often a topic is addressed. We combine the results of both of the methods to analyse the most noteworthy topics. We found that test automation, test design and planning, coverage analysis were the most frequently and extensively discussed topics in our corpus. We conclude that although the books cover some major topics that are demanded by the industry, there are also areas such as test management and usability testing, which are underrepresented. We also observed that the popular software testing books do not cover the rising software testing trends. While JUnit was the most discussed framework, in general the software testing books do not include practical information for specific frameworks or tools, but rather focus on the tool selection process.