Effort Analysis of Unit Testing Conducted by Non-Developer of Source Code

Unit testing is one of the test levels, which tests an individual unit or a group of related units. Recently, in Agile Development or Safety-critical System Development, the unit testing plays an important role for the qualities. According to the definition of unit testing, it is supposed to be done by the developers of units. That is because test models for the unit testing refers to the structure of units, and others but its original developers hardly can understand the structures. However, in practice, unit testing is often asked to be done without the original developers. For example, it is when faults are revealed in customer sites and the development team does not exit any more. In this case, instead of original developers, other developers or test engineers take a product and test it. The unit testing done by a non-developer, who is not the original developer, would cause some difficulties or cause more cost. In this paper, we tests an open source, JTopas, as a non-developer, with building test models, implementing test codes, and executing test cases. To fit this experiment to practical testing situations, we designed it based on the practices of unit testing, which were surveyed through SPIN(Software Process Improvement Network). This paper analyzes which part of unit testing done by non-developers needs more effort compared to the unit testing done by original developers. And it concludes that Agile Development contributes on reducing the extra effort caused by non-developers, since it implements test codes first before developing source code. That means all the units have already included their own tests code when they are released.