Testing in agile software development is important to ensure that the rightproduct is being developed. Is it possible to include everyone in agilesoftware development by using a business readable DSL and also createtest cases based directly on that DSL?Observations, interviews, a study of literature, third degree collectedartifacts and an implementation has been performed to analyse the processof introducing Gherkin as a tool in agile software development projects.The process of performing and conducting tests has been examined at Accedoto understand how Gherkin together with CucumberJS can be usedin projects, with the purpose of increasing collaboration between dierentroles and create a ubiquitous way of referring to the same piece of softwarewithout the need to specifying implementation details.To include the entire project team in the whole process of developingsoftware is essential for a usage of Gherkin to be successful. Since thepurpose is that everyone should be able to contribute as well as understandthe progress of development in projects and share an agreement on whatis being developed. A business readable DSL provides a uniform formatto specifying tasks causing the internal communication to be improved inprojects.

Test case design and generation is a tedious manual process that requires 40-70% of the software test life cycle. The test cases written manually by inexperienced testers may not offer a complete coverage of the requirements. Frequent changes in requirements reduce the reusability of the manually written test cases costing more time and effort. Most projects in the industry follow a Behavior-Driven software development approach to capturing requirements from the business stakeholders through user stories written in natural language. Instead of writing test cases manually, this thesis investigates a practical solution for automatically generating test cases within an Agile software development workflow using natural language-based user stories and acceptance criteria. However, the information provided by the user story is insufficient to create test cases using natural language processing (NLP), so we have introduced two new input parameters, Test Scenario Description and Dictionary, to improve the test case generation process. To establish the feasibility, we developed a tool that uses NLP techniques to generate functional test cases from the free-form test scenario description automatically. The tool reduces the effort required to create the test cases while improving the test coverage and quality of the test suite. Results from the feasibility study are presented in this thesis. / Master of Science

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-22T22:00:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Eliane Figueiredo Collins.pdf: 2314673 bytes, checksum: 8403bd67cffed913ac9029447401f980 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-04-25 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / For some time, the professional software development companies are looking for new technical alternatives in order to optimize their processes, to deliver products to market as soon as possible and to meet customer expectations, increasingly demanding and intolerant of software failures. In this sense, the agile software development is gaining more space and consequently the software testing area which was previously considered a separate phase of development has changed over time to adapt to this new reality. The test automation activity is seen as key of agile development, but many teams still don t know how it should be done, who should take responsibility and run it and the correct procedures for this activity to be successful. Although the literature mentions about the particularities activities and best practices in this scenario, there are few related works and lack of experience reports or case studies that show, in practice, examples of use this from start to finish the automation strategy adopted. This paper aims to contribute to improving the quality of agile processes, and proposes an approach that involves the application of agile manifesto values in the activities of test automation, which can be used regardless of agile methodology adopted. In this study, observations were made on empirical about testing practices in agile projects developed at Nokia Technology Institute (INdT) and an experimental implementation of this approach at the Center for Electronic and Information Technology (CETELI), Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM). Experimental reports are available with different strategies for the automation of software testing and identification of some important issues to deal with difficulties in adapting testers and developers in this new scenario. / Há algum tempo as empresas desenvolvedoras de software profissional vêm buscando novas alternativas técnicas com o objetivo de otimizar seus processos, entregar produtos para o mercado o mais cedo possível e ainda atender as expectativas dos clientes cada vez mais exigentes e intolerantes a falhas de software. Com isso, as metodologias ágeis de desenvolvimento de software estão ganhando mais espaço e consequentemente a área de testes de software que antes era considerada uma fase separada do desenvolvimento vem passando por mudanças para se adaptar a esta nova realidade. A atividade de automação de teste passou a ser vista como peça chave para o desenvolvimento ágil, porém muitas equipes ainda não sabem como ela deve ser feita, quem deve assumir a responsabilidade e execução dela e os procedimentos para que essa atividade seja bem sucedida. Embora a literatura mencione particularidades sobre as atividades realizadas e as melhores práticas nesse cenário, são poucos os trabalhos relacionados e há falta de relatos de estudos de caso ou exemplos de utilização que mostrem, na prática, do início ao fim, a estratégia de automação adotada. Este trabalho tem como objetivo contribuir para a melhoria da qualidade dos processos ágeis, propondo uma abordagem que envolve a aplicação de valores presentes no manifesto ágil nas atividades de automação de teste, que podem ser utilizadas independentemente da metodologia ágil adotada. Nesta pesquisa, foram realizadas observações empíricas sobre as práticas de testes em projetos ágeis desenvolvidos no Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia (INdT) e um experimento de aplicação dessa abordagem no Centro de Tecnologia Eletrônica e da Informação (CETELI), da Universidade Federal do Amazonas (UFAM). São disponibilizados relatos experimentais com diferentes estratégias relativas a automação de teste de software e a identificação de algumas questões importantes para lidar