Volunteer team, asynchronous testing: an undergraduate thesis builds a QA strategy in pandemic times
Vítor Cardoso Xoteslem defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis crafting a testing strategy for the Doarti app — maintained by a geographically distributed volunteer team under pandemic-forced remote work.
Brasília, October 25, 2021
Testing software alone is hard enough. Testing with a team that only exists on Slack, spread across time zones, and made entirely of volunteers is another level of problem — the kind of problem the pandemic pushed to center stage. This is the scenario Vítor Cardoso Xoteslem addresses in his undergraduate thesis, defended in October 2021 at FCTE/UnB and advised by Prof. Fabiana Freitas Mendes .
Doarti is an application that brings together charities and donors — a social project maintained by volunteers. With the physical distancing imposed by COVID-19, the team started operating asynchronously and remotely, and quality assurance became a coordination challenge as much as a technical one. The question guiding the thesis is: how to structure testing without a co-located team and without uniformly dedicated time?
The answer weaves verification and validation with distributed teamwork . The work proposes a testing strategy with clear responsibility assignment, a cadence compatible with volunteering, and checkpoints that reduce the cognitive cost of following what has already been done. It is a contribution that reaches well beyond Doarti — in a decade in which remote teams became the norm rather than the exception.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions.