Software testing is vital for the delivery and support of applications that affect all of us, whether apps on our phones, systems to help run finance and business, avionics software in planes. or medical systems used in hospitals. It’s performed by specialist testers, developers and others in IT projects, and is supported by tools.
After a career in industry of nearly 40 years, UM doctoral researcher Isabel Evans has been applying HCI techniques to understand the characteristics of the people testing software, and their experiences with the tools they use. This work forms part of her PhD research within the Faculty of ICT, under the supervision of Prof. Chris Porter and Prof. Mark Micallef.
In June, Isabel presented the opening keynote at the largest industry software testing conference in Europe, It was well received, and scored as outstanding in content and delivery by the industry practitioners in the audience.
This work was completed through a qualitative study of testers from multiple countries, working in many domains. She discovered that testers in industry do not meet the recruitment stereotype for an IT person. The research uncovered information about their backgrounds, hobbies, roles and characteristics. Breaking stereotyping, better supporting diversity in testers’ backgrounds and characteristics, might encourage changes in recruitment, on-boarding, approaches, tool support and attitudes to the testing activity.
After asking testers about their experiences with tools, she discovered that a good user interface is not enough to guarantee the desired outcomes from a tool.
The over-focusing on attractiveness over usefulness, might neglect maintainability, performance, and/or security.
Based on research evidence of the characteristics of testers, and their experiences, she set out to build an evidence-based framework to help tool designers and testers determine the attributes of the tools they design and use.
She will be at , the World’s Largest Virtual Software Testing Conference taking place between 19 and 21 August 2025. Her session will help those tuning in make the right decision when choosing tools for testing needs.
Isabel’s research through University of Malta has allowed a rigorous, evidence-based approach to solving an industry problem, that is accessible to and useful for industry practitioners. Her research takes a people-focused approach that arose from real-life experiences in industry and led to the academic papers: “Stuck in Limbo with Magical Solutions”, “Scared, Frustrated and Quietly Proud”, and “Test tools: An illusion of usability”. Isabel’s most recent work on breaking tester stereotypes has also been accepted for publication in the Interacting with Computers (IwC) journal, which is a highly regarded, peer-reviewed scholarly periodical in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) published by Oxford University Press in collaboration with BCS, the British Computer Society, specifically through its Interaction Specialist Group.
Isabel has chaired EuroSTAR (2019) and HUSTEF (2018), and presented popular tutorials and storytelling keynotes at conferences worldwide. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and received the 2017 EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award.
