This article describes the real benefits that DesignWise and the pairwise testing methodology generated in client engagements. It provides empirical evidence gathered on multiple real-world projects that compared the effectiveness of DesignWise scenarios to manually selected tests. The data shows that, as compared to manually-selected test scripts, DesignWise-generated tests are both faster to create and are more thorough and efficient.
IEEE study of 10 real-world projects: 30-50% faster to create tests
Any tester familiar with using DesignWise will confirm that generating tests with the push of a button is much faster than selecting and documenting tests by hand. Results from a four-month-long study at banks and insurance firms confirmed that savings here are typically 30-50%.
IEEE study of 10 real-world projects: Detect more than twice as many defects in tests per tester hour
A 10-project study published in IEEE found that tests generated by DesignWise resulted in testers finding an average of 2.4 X as many defects per tester hour as compared to experienced testers’ manually selection.
While testers are often surprised that the benefits from packing more coverage into fewer tests can be so large, hundreds of additional projects have shown similar results.
IEEE study of 10 real-world projects: Consistently more thorough testing coverage achieved
The same IEEE Computer study also found that using DesignWise-generated tests increased testing thoroughness every time. Testers using DesignWise consistently found more defects. On average, the much smaller quanity of DesignWise-generated tests found 13% more defects than the larger quantity of hand-selected tests. In order to get an “apples to apples” comparison, both sets of tests were designed to be equivalent to one another to test (a) the same systems and (b) at the same times.
The chart above shows the testing thoroughness of 21 DesignWise-generated tests (in green) compared to the thoroughness of 51 real tests used by a financial services firm (in blue).
8-project BCBS study: Testers using DesignWise created tests in much less time.
Testers at BCBSNC found that once they put their test inputs into DesignWise, creating tests was much faster than selecting and documenting tests by hand.
For example, one tester who had recently spent more than one full day putting test cases together by hand had attended her first DesignWise training session shortly afterward. During that training session, she generated a powerful set of tests with DesignWise in less than an hour. Her DesignWise-generated tests were also more thorough than the previous manual tests.
8-project BCBS study: DesignWise-generated tests found three times as many defects per tester hour.
In a project involving insurance claims testing, BCBSNC testers had already selected 48 test scripts to execute. Another tester used DesignWise to create a smaller set of 16 tests for the same system that packed as much coverage as possible into each optimized test. Both sets of tests were executed. They revealed the same two defects but the DesignWise tests took only a third as long to execute.
This result was repeated in 4 other projects: on average, testers only required one third as many DesignWise-generated tests to achieve the same level of testing thoroughness as compared to manually-selected tests.
8-project BCBS study: 69% reduction in the number of required tests
Multiple projects confirmed that the hoped-for efficiency benefits from DesignWise were in fact consistently achieved on real-world projects. Testers using DesignWise were able to create small sets of unusually powerful tests. On average, testers only needed one third as many tests to achieve the same level of testing thoroughness.
8-project BCBS study: DesignWise-generated tests were consistently much more thorough than prior testing methods.
The charts above show the thoroughness of two different sets of tests designed to test the same system. The coverage of the 58 DesignWise tests (in orange) is far superior to the thoroughness of the 72 manual tests recently used by BCBSNC’s test automation team (in blue). The slope of the DesignWise coverage chart also shows how the tool front-loads coverage to find defects as early as possible.
There were 12,088 pairs of values within this system to be tested. The optimized DesignWise tests tested all of them. The original BCBSNC tests, however, had failed to test more than 5,000 of those pairs. In other words, the DesignWise tests had 5,000 fewer small gaps in coverage with fewer tests.
Consistent findings from more than 3,500 testers using DesignWise at one of our larger clients: “DesignWise just plain works.”
The client has more than 3,500 testers generating scenarios with DesignWise. The vast majority of those users decided to sign up one-at-a-time to leverage their company’s unlimited-use enterprise license of DesignWise. That says a lot. In other words, the number of DesignWise users did not grow from dozens to hundreds to thousands of users because of a top-down mandate that imposed a new tool on testers. The testers had to individually choose to sign up for their licenses.
If you ask the hundreds of new testers who sign up each month why they decided to create their DesignWise accounts, do you know what they will tell you? Their most popular answer, by an overwhelming margin, is that they heard good things about DesignWise from other testers! Enthusiastic word of mouth recommendations for DesignWise drove global adoption throughout the firm for the obvious reasons that DesignWise works well and it is enjoyable to use.
More specifically:
- Software testers recommending DesignWise say that it really helps them design tests faster, execute fewer, more powerful tests, and remove many tedious, error-prone steps introduced from manually testing before.
- Managers recommend DesignWise to other managers for similar reasons: they see the tool helps get higher quality products to market in less time. They see fewer, more powerful tests created faster; they receive more objective and insightful reporting on testing coverage achieved. They are better able to assess “how much testing is enough?”