Software Testing: A Tertiary Survey of the Literature

Abstract

The continuous evolution software emphasizes the importance of testing to ensure the quality of the product being developed. However, the dispersion of secondary studies hinders the understanding of the testing domain. The objective of this paper is to organize and synthesize the secondary studies available in the literature on software testing. To achieve this, a tertiary literature survey was conducted following systematic mapping guidelines. A total of 900 articles were sourced from four relevant databases. Of these, 102 secondary studies were selected for analysis. These studies revealed that the most extensively researched topics are test techniques and test processes. Additionally, the publication rate has consistently averaged over 10 secondary studies per year over the past nine years.