  Software testing is an integral part of modern software engineering practice.
Past research has not only underlined its significance, but also revealed its
multi-faceted nature. The practice of software testing and its adoption is
influenced by many factors that go beyond tools or technology. This paper sets
out to investigate the context of software testing from the practitioners'
point of view by mining and analyzing sentimental posts on the widely used
question and answer website Stack Overflow. By qualitatively analyzing
sentimental expressions of practitioners, which we extract from the Stack
Overflow dataset using sentiment analysis tools, we discern factors that help
us to better understand the lived experience of software engineers with regards
to software testing. Grounded in the data that we have analyzed, we argue that
sentiments like insecurity, despair and aspiration, have an impact on
practitioners' attitude towards testing. We suggest that they are connected to
concrete factors like the level of complexity of projects in which software
testing is practiced.
