SURVEY ON TESTING COST

Testing is often seen as a mainly time and money consuming activity within the software engineering process. Forthis reason, many companies choose not to automate tests or even eliminate tests completely in order to save expenses. However, the costs of running automated, manual, or even no tests at all dif er immensely and are not always obvious at first glance. There exist metrics that determine the costs of automated testing. Though, cost metrics for manual and not running tests are not studied. This paper presents a promising metric for automated tests and proposes two metrics for the two other cases. An example illustrates the use of the metrics. Having those metrics at hand, it is possible to make a proper comparison between the three test approaches and argue how much testing costs and whether it makes sense not to test categories and subject descriptors.