Understanding the Quality Assurance Engineers' Brain from the Neuroscience Perspective

Software Quality Assurance involves assessing every phase of the software development process to ensure that the outcomes and the final product meet the desired quality. In general, a software quality assurance engineer (QA) needs to have different abilities to oversee the entire development process, which includes software quality, from beginning to end. Previous studies have identified some of these abilities through self-reported data but they may not be totally reliable due to various biases that may affect the results. Advances in medical imaging are increasingly applied to software engineering offering a unique opportunity to understand, build, and test theories of program comprehension like never before. Neuroimaging has shown very powerful in supporting neurobiological explorations of software development activities; however, we lack a thorough understanding of the human cognitive processes underlying software testing activities. Recent studies using electroencephalogram (EEG) revealed a relationship between mental load and expertise. This work aims to explore the mental load and processes involved when a QA writes a test design or reviews a test code,  investigate whether we can distinguish a QA from ordinary ones,  and, collect evidence on how to improve the testing process by detecting and comparing brain activity, monitoring and analyzing software quality Assurance engineers’ biofeedback during automation testing activities using EEG.