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On rapid releases and software testing: a case study and a semi-systematic literature review

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Abstract

Large open and closed source organizations like Google, Facebook and Mozilla are migrating their products towards rapid releases. While this allows faster time-to-market and user feedback, it also implies less time for testing and bug fixing. Since initial research results indeed show that rapid releases fix proportionally less reported bugs than traditional releases, this paper investigates the changes in software testing effort after moving to rapid releases in the context of a case study on Mozilla Firefox, and performs a semi-systematic literature review. The case study analyzes the results of 312,502 execution runs of the 1,547 mostly manual system-level test cases of Mozilla Firefox from 2006 to 2012 (5 major traditional and 9 major rapid releases), and triangulates our findings with a Mozilla QA engineer. We find that rapid releases have a narrower test scope that enables a deeper investigation of the features and regressions with the highest risk. Furthermore, rapid releases make testing more continuous and have proportionally smaller spikes before the main release. However, rapid releases make it more difficult to build a large testing community , and they decrease test suite diversity and make testing more deadline oriented. In addition, our semi-systematic literature review presents the benefits, problems and enablers of rapid releases from 24 papers found using systematic search queries and a similar amount of papers found through other means. The literature review shows that rapid releases are a prevalent industrial practice that are utilized even in some highly critical domains of software engineering, and that rapid releases originated from several software development methodologies such as agile, open source, lean and internet-speed software development. However, empirical studies proving evidence of the claimed advantages and disadvantages of rapid releases are scarce.

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Acknowledgment

We would like to thank the Mozilla QA engineer who provided feedback to our findings. His responses are accounts of personal experience and opinion, and are in no means whatsoever an official statement from Mozilla. This work has been partially supported by EU FP7 Grant 318082 (U-QASAR, http://www.uqasar.eu/), ELLIIT (the StrategicArea for ICT research, funded by the Swedish Government, http://www.liu.se/elliit), N4S (research program managed by DIGILE and funded by TEKES, http://www.n4s.fi/), and NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

    Mika V. Mäntylä

  2. MCIS, Polytechnique Montréal, Québec, Canada

    Bram Adams

  3. SWAT, Polytechnique Montréal, Québec, Canada

    Foutse Khomh

  4. Department of Computer Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Emelie Engström

  5. School of Computing, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden

    Kai Petersen

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  1. Mika V. Mäntylä
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Correspondence to Mika V. Mäntylä.

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Communicated by: Yann-Gaél Guéhéneuc and Tom Mens

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Mäntylä, M.V., Adams, B., Khomh, F. et al. On rapid releases and software testing: a case study and a semi-systematic literature review. Empir Software Eng 20, 1384–1425 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-014-9338-4

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