Andy Zaidman

keynote

First Steps in Testing Analytics: Does Test Code Quality Matter?

Everybody understands that automated (developer) testing is an important part of the quality assurance process. Its benefits include early defect detection, defect cause localization and removal of fear to apply changes. In this talk we will explore whether the quality of the actual test code can play a role as well. In particular, first we will investigate what the characteristics are of high-quality test code, i.e. which metrics we can use. Secondly, we determine whether high quality test code has an influence that goes beyond defect detection. In particular, we will be looking into whether good tests allow to implement new features more quickly and resolve bugs more efficiently.

Andy Zaidman is an associate professor in software engineering at the Delft University of Technology. His mission is to investigate ways to ease software evolution, effectively helping software engineers to make changes to existing software in a more efficient way, without sacrificing its quality. That is why an important area of his research lies is software testing. In this context, in 2013 dr. Zaidman received a prestigious NWO Vidi career grant, which enables him to perform research in software testing for the next 5 years. Andy Zaidman teaches the introductory courses on object-oriented programming at TU Delft, making sure that students write tests 3 weeks after making their very first programming steps.