Effect of Time-pressure on Perceived and Actual Performance in Functional Software Testing

Abstract

Background: Time-pressure is an inevitable reality of software industry that influences the performance of software engineers. It may result in adverse effects on software quality or distort the perception of performance on executed tasks to differ from actual performance. Objective: We aim to investigate the effect of timepressure on perceived and actual performance of software testers in the context of functional software testing. Method: We performed two controlled experiments with 87 graduate students in two academic terms. We assessed actual performance in terms of coverage (i.e. percentage of test cases correctly identified) and perceived performance using NASA-TLX. We have an independent factorial design for our experimental study. Results: The results reveal a significant effect of time-pressure on actual performance. However, we could not observe a significant effect of time-pressure on the perceived performance of the participants for the task undertaken. We also observed a significant negative correlation between actual and perceived performance when controlled for time-pressure and experimental session factors. Conclusion: Time-pressure affects the actual performance in a testing task but the perception of accomplishment by the testers is sustained irrespective of time-pressure, indicating an over-estimation issue. Perception of performance should be adjusted to align with reality to account for the effect of time pressure. This will lead to better self estimates of performance.