Pragmatic software testing education

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

29 Citations (Scopus)
2189 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSIGCSE 2019 - Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages414-420
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-5890-3/19/2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 22 Feb 2019
Event50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Minneapolis, United States
Duration: 27 Feb 20192 Mar 2019
Conference number: 50

Conference

Conference50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
Abbreviated titleSIGCSE 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityMinneapolis
Period27/02/192/03/19

Keywords

  • Computer science education
  • Software engineering education
  • Software testing education

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