Estimating Manual Test Execution Effort and Capacity Based On Execution Points
Eduardo Henrique da Silva Aranha, Paulo Henrique Monteiro Borba · International Journal of Computers and Applications · 2009
In some domains, such as the mobile application domain, functional tests may not be feasible to automate due to limited test automation technology (multimedia support, etc.) or high cost to port automated tests for different phone models and operating systems. In this context, test teams should be able to estimate the effort required to manually execute tests on schedule.Although several effort estimation approaches have been proposed over the years, none of them are appropriate for estimating manual test execution effort. The main reason for that is the lack of size measures for test projects. In this paper, we present execution points, a measure for the size and execution complexity of tests that is calculated based on test specifications. We also show how to estimate manual test execution effort and capacity based on this measure. Finally, results from an empirical study suggested the viability of our proposed measure.