The topic of this thesis is the issue of software testing. The thesis places main emphasis on tools to support test management, manual and automated functional testing and last but not least the tools for defect tracking. The aim of this thesis is introduce readers with software testing, especially with tools that can be used to support testing. The aim is offer an overview of the basic commercial and freely distributed tools for test management, manual testing, automated functional testing and defect tracking. Another aim is design criteria that simplify selection of tool. The second aim of this thesis is practical example of the configuration and description of the basic work with tools IBM Rational - ClearQuest, ClearCase, Manual Tester and Functional Tester. The aims of this thesis were achieved by studying available sources and by own practical experience with the tools to support testing. The contribution of this thesis lies in the characteristics of the selected tools to support testing and especially in design of criteria by which tools can be selected. The last part of thesis provides practical instruction how to configure and work with the tools to support testing of IBM Rational. The thesis is conceived in three main parts. The first part attends to basic terms, which can be found in the area of testing, and to overview of types of tests. There are also described two most famous life-cycle models and methodology RUP. The second part attends to overview of tools to support testing, attention is given to areas: test management, manual testing, defect tracking, and automated functional testing. For each category of tools has been defined criteria according to which tools can be selected. The last part attends to practical example of setting and basic work with the selected tools to support testing of IBM Rational.

Context: Exploratory testing (ET) is an approach to test software with a strong focus on personal skills and freedom of the tester. ET emphasises the simultaneous design and execution of tests with minimal test documentation. Test practitioners often claim that their choice to use ET as an important alternative to scripted testing is based on several benefits ET exhibits over the scripted testing. However, these claims lack empirical evidence as there is little research done in this area. Moreover, ET is usually considered an ad-hoc way of doing testing as everyone does it differently. There have been some attempts in past to provide structure to ET. Session based test management (SBTM) is an approach that attempts to provide some structure to ET and gives some basic guidelines to structuring the test sessions. However, these guidelines are still very abstract and are very open to individuals' interpretation. Objective: The main objective of this doctoral thesis is to support practitioners in their decisions about choosing exploratory versus scripted testing. Furthermore, it is also aimed to investigate the empirical evidence in support of ET and find ways to structure ET and classify different levels of exploration that drive the choices made by exploratory testers. Another objective of this thesis is to provide a decision support system to select levels of exploration in overall test process. Method: The findings presented in this thesis are obtained through a controlled experiment with participants from industry and academia, exploratory surveys, interviews and focus groups conducted at different companies including Ericsson AB, Sony Mobile Communications, Axis Communications AB and Softhouse Consulting Baltic AB. Results: Using the exploratory survey, we found three test techniques to be most relevant in context of testing software systems and in particular heterogeneous systems. The most frequently used technique mentioned by the practitioners is ET which is not a much researched topic. We also found many interesting claims about ET in grey literature produced by practitioners in the form of informal presentations and blogs but these claims lacked any empirical evidence. Therefore, a controlled experiment was conducted with students and industry practitioners to compare ET with scripted testing. The experiment results show that ET detects significantly more critical defects compared to scripted testing and is more time efficient. However, ET has its own limitations and there is not a single way to use it for testing. In order to provide structure to ET, we conducted a study where we propose checklists to support test charter design in ET. Furthermore, two more industrial focus group studies at four companies were conducted that resulted in a taxonomy of exploration levels in ET and a decision support method for selecting exploration levels in ET. Lastly, we investigated different problems that researchers face when conducting surveys in software engineering and have presented mitigation strategies for these problems. Conclusion: The taxonomy for levels of exploration in ET, proposed in this thesis, provided test practitioners at the companies a better understanding of the underlying concepts of ET and a way to structure their test charters. A number of influence factors elicited as part of this thesis also help them prioritise which level of exploration suits more to their testing in the context of their products. Furthermore, the decision support method provided the practitioners to reconsider their current test focus to test their products in a more effective way.

This thesis focuses on test management tools and automated testing. The project covers analysis of existing open source tools and proposes its own BDD orientated test management tool in the form of a web service. The project aims to specify and design this application based on the process of Behaviour driven development. The resulting application TestBuDDy allows for test library management. Changes on the test library are projected onto a remote repository of software under test (SUT) and triggers a test run (the test library is being run against SUT by the BDD framework). TestBuDDy is able to save the test run results, parse them into a report and generate and group found issues. The application also allows requirement management and user management. The application is integrated with the CI/CD tool Gitlab CI, the BDD framework JBehave and the issue tracker JIRA. The application is designed to help testers during their work and also to be expandable within the open source community.

Studien undersöker de automatiserade testverktygen: Ghost Inspector och Selenium. En limiterad litteraturstudie och två fallstudier görs, för att undersöka och utvärdera testverktygen. Detta för att kunna tillgodose riktlinjer som är användbara, vid val av ett verktyg för att utföra regressionstestning på webbapplikationer.IStone använder Ghost Inspector som verktyg vid regressionstest på webb applikationer, eftersom det ger dem en effektiv konfigurering och underhålls- process. Selenium kräver mer ansträngning för konfigurering och underhåll, eftersom verktygen inte är en tjänst. Miljön i Ghost Inspector underlättar för iStone att exekvera test kontinuerligt och förser projektteamet med det senaste testresultatet. / The study evaluates the automatic testing tools: Ghost Inspector and Selenium. and focuses on comparing them in terms of the set up and maintenance processes. The study includes a limited literature study and two case studies. The purpose is to evaluate the tools and provide guidelines for choosing a regression testing tool when testing the functionality of web applications.IStone use Ghost Inspector as regressions testing tool on web applications, since it offers an effective set up and maintenance process. Selenium requires more effort to set up and maintain, since Selenium is not a service. The Ghost Inspector environment comforts iStone with the ability of executing test continuously and supplies the latest test results to the project team.

Big amounts of test data generated by the current used software testing tools (QA-C/QA-C++ and Cantata) contain a variety of different values. The variances cause enormous challenges in data aggregation and interpretation that directly affect generation of test metrics. Due to the circumstance of data processing, this master thesis introduces a database-centric test management framework for test metrics aims at centrally handling the big data as well as facilitating the generation of test metrics. Each test result will be individually parsed to be a particular format before being stored in a centralized database. A friendly front-end user interface is connected and synchronized with the database that allows authorized users to interact with the stored data. With a granularity tracking mechanism, any stored data will be systematically located and programmatically interpreted by a test metrics generator to create various kinds of high-quality test metrics. The automatization of the framework is driven by Jenkins CI to automatically and periodically performing the sequential operations. The technology greatly and effectively optimizes and reduces effort in the development, as well as enhance the performance of the software testing processes. In this research, the framework is only started at managing the testing processes on software-unit level. However, because of the independence of the database from levels of software testing, it could also be expanded to support software development at any level.

Nowadays the development speed of new software products is a key to success and it is not important whether the aim is to make customer's urges satisfied or get ahead of one's competitors and fill the market gap. Because of the increase of development speed the demands on the saving process of software quality are increasing. There are two types of tools that are supporting the process of software quality assurance. Firstly, we talk about comprehensive testing tools of commercial character that usually include many functions, but their purchase is extremely expensive. On the other hand there are open-source tools that are available for free, they function on many kinds of operating systems and it is possible to modify them. Unfortunately their functions are basically focused on a certain subset of controlling the software quality assurance. Company TRASK solution a.s. has decided to change this current situation, so it asked competence centre Software Quality Assurance at the University of Economics in Prague in order to create Integrated Testing Node (ITN) that would combine the advantages of open-source tools. Moreover, it would offer broad range of functions as commercial solution. The purpose of this thesis is to describe relevant phases of the process of creating the Integrated Testing Node from the factual and methodical point of view. This aim is divided into partial aims included task analysis and the proposal of solving system, open-source products portfolio analysis, choice of the most convenient tools for following integration, choosing the method of information system building, evaluating the feedback from a client and the proposal of future development of this tool. As far as the biggest contribution of this thesis is concerned, it is the realisation of ITN project that can be used during information classes at the University of Economics in Prague. Furthermore, it can be used as the control of software quality in commercial companies.

Big amounts of test data generated by the current used software testing tools (QA-C/QA-C++ and Cantata) contain a variety of different values. The variances cause enormous challenges in data aggregation and interpretation that directly affect generation of test metrics. Due to the circumstance of data processing, this master thesis introduces a database-centric test management framework for test metrics aims at centrally handling the big data as well as facilitating the generation of test metrics. Each test result will be individually parsed to be a particular format before being stored in a centralized database. A friendly front-end user interface is connected and synchronized with the database that allows authorized users to interact with the stored data. With a granularity tracking mechanism, any stored data will be systematically located and programmatically interpreted by a test metrics generator to create various kinds of high-quality test metrics. The automatization of the framework is driven by Jenkins CI to automatically and periodically performing the sequential operations. The technology greatly and effectively optimizes and reduces effort in the development, as well as enhance the performance of the software testing processes. In this research, the framework is only started at managing the testing processes on software-unit level. However, because of the independence of the database from levels of software testing, it could also be expanded to support software development at any level.