Gamification for Web Testing: Development of a Browser Tool

In software engineering, testing is a vital part of the entire development cycle, and Graphical User Interface Testing is a fundamental step of it, although often neglected due to the fragility of test cases needed for automated testing tools and the fact that such test cases have to be manually created by the testers, which is a cumbersome and unappealing task. The thesis work aims to find a possible solution to the problem of GUI testing being a tiresome activity by adopting the use of Gamification (the use of elements and strategies typically part of game design in non-recreational contexts). This choice was made after hypothesizing that performing a testing session of a website while having interesting game mechanics would make testing a more pleasurable activity. The idea was implemented through the development of a Google Chrome extension that records actions performed by a tester on a website, keeps track of scores and progresses and generates automatic test cases that are compatible with tools that are usually used in GUI testing, aiming to solve the issue of test cases being cumbersome to write manually. The game mechanics adopted during the development of the extension were selected in order to increase participation and competition; such mechanics are some of the most commonly used ones and include: progress bars detailing page coverage, leaderboards ranking all the users, avatars that can be unlocked and shown, unlockable achievements after performing relevant milestones. A preliminary usability evaluation has been conducted after development, in order to assess the general usability of the system, to see if there's room for improvement or necessary fixes, as well as to evaluate the reception of gamification elements: the main goal was to observe which of the adopted ones were effective in increasing user participation and interest in the testing activity. The results of the evaluation showed that the majority of the participants appreciated the competitive aspect of the extension, explaining that the presence of a leaderboard where they could see the scores of other users drove them to interact more with the tested pages in order to increase their scores. Many evaluators also revealed the usefulness of progress bars and of the functionality that marked elements that could be interacted with were useful in order to understand which were the missing components to interact with in order to fully test a single web page. Even though the sample size of the evaluation was too small to be considered significant, it can be assumed that the use of gamified mechanics in the context of GUI Testing can bring positive results, especially in terms of participation and interest, the two main observable obstacles in said discipline. These results are in line with the principal findings in related software engineering literature and encourage further developments and evaluations of the proposed tool.