Abstract:
The purpose of this research is to study the reasons and conflict management styles in software
testing phase. The research emphasizes on the frequency, intensity and the significance of conflicts
occurred among the testing tearns and their counterparts such as project managers and programmers.
The tool for this research is a questionnaire used to survey the opinions of test managers, test
leaders and testers. The obtained results were analyzed using several statistical techniques including
frequency, mean, percentage, standard deviation, Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient
and independent samples t test.
The comparative study and statistical analyses reveal both comparable and significant different
attitudes on each reason of conflicts among groups of experienced software testers with different
characteristic of project. The results indicated that conflicts between testing tearns and programmers
tend to be larger than those occurred between testing teams and project managers. In studying the
conflict management styles in software testing phase, it was found that collaborating and competing
were the effective styles and frequently used whereas dominating and avoiding were used the least.