Gamified Exploratory GUI Testing of Web Applications: a Preliminary Evaluation

In the context of Software Engineering, testing is a well-known phase that plays a critical role, as is needed to ensure that the designed and produced code provides the expected results, avoiding faults and crashes. Exploratory GUI testing allows the tester to manually define test cases by directly interacting with the user interface of the finite system. However, testers often loosely perform exploratory GUI testing, as they perceive it as a time-consuming, repetitive and unappealing activity. We defined a gamified framework for GUI testing to address this issue, which we developed and integrated into the Augmented testing tool, Scout. Gamification is perceived as a means to enhance the performance of human testers by stimulating competition and encouraging them to achieve better results in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. We performed a preliminary evaluation of the gamification layer with a small sample of testers to assess the benefits of the technique compared with the standard version of the same tool. Test sequences defined with the gamified tool achieved higher coverage (i.e., higher efficiency) and a slightly higher percentage of bugs found. The user's opinion was almost unanimously in favor of the gamified version of the tool.