Effectiveness of software testing techniques in enterprise: a case study

Research questions.
 
Some questions are raised for the research in order to explore the 
effectiveness of software testing techniques in terms of limitations and improvements: 
1.
What are the main software testing techniques used to ensure software quality in an 
enterprise? 
2.
How to improve the use of software testing techniques and testing processes in order to 
ensure software quality? 
3.
What are the most problematic areas in software testing process? How do these aspects affect 
software quality? What process of these areas can be automated? 
4.
What topics on software quality assurance are lacking? 
3.2.
 Setting and Participants 
The selected company (hereinafter - Company) specializing in developing software core systems 
for insurance companies was chosen for this case study. Company is headquartered in San Francisco, 
USA, and its offices are in different locations: Lithuania, Belarus, China, Japan, Brazil, Australia and 
New Zealand. The medium-sized (according to EU SME categorization) Company in Lithuania has 
been chosen to take part in our research due to several reasons. Firstly, it is the main office which 
focuses on core system development, while others work directly for client's needs by customizing and 
maintaining the system. Secondly, QA team are more specialized as their activities are separated from 
developers and business analysts. Thirdly, the core system requires more testing because of vast of 

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new functionality implementation. And finally, all R&D teams are involved in software development, 
and each of them specializes on different elements (component) of software. Nevertheless, their 
processes are very related with each other, so the communication between them are continual. In spite 
of these facts, the common processes are used for all teams to ensure quality of software. As we 
discussed before, each team has a slightly different process on software testing, including the use of 
different techniques and tools. We will seek to explore the main similarities between them and the 
main limitations that they are facing with. Thus, the main characteristics of experts that participated in 
our research are presented in a table below (see Table 9, page 50). The changed names of teams and 
experts will be used for further conducted data analysis.