Pragmatic software testing education

Pragmatic software testing education

Aniche, Maurício (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Hermans, F.F.J. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
van Deursen, A. (TU Delft Software Technology)

Software Technology

2019-02-22

Software testing is an important topic in software engineering education, and yet highly challenging from an educational perspective: students are required to learn several testing techniques, to be able to distinguish the right technique to apply, to evaluate the quality of their test suites, and to write maintainable test code. In this paper, we describe how we have been adding a pragmatic perspective to our software testing course, and explore students' common mistakes, hard topics to learn, favourite learning activities, and challenges they face. To that aim, we analyze the feedback reports that our team of Teaching Assistants gave to the 230 students of our 2016-2017 software testing course at Delft University of Technology. We also survey 84 students and seven of our teaching assistants on their perceptions. Our results help educators not only to propose pragmatic software testing courses in their faculties, but also bring understanding on the challenges that software testing students face when taking software testing courses.

Computer science education
Software engineering education
Software testing education

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b36407d1-b5ff-4825-9318-f36124f08e7b

https://doi.org/10.1145/3287324.3287461

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

978-1-4503-5890-3/19/2

SIGCSE 2019 - Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2019-02-27 → 2019-03-02, Minneapolis, United States

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2019 Maurício Aniche, F.F.J. Hermans, A. van Deursen