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Using a real world project in a software testing course
Krutz D., Malachowsky S., Reichlmayr T.  SIGCSE 2014 (Proceedings of the 45th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Atlanta, GA, Mar 5-8, 2014)49-54.2014.Type:Proceedings
Date Reviewed: Jun 24 2015

Is there a really good way to teach students how to test software? In the overhaul of a traditional software testing course, a decision was made to allow student teams the choice of a real-world, open-source project to test. Their choices are approved by the instructor no later than week 3. By week 6, students have submitted test plans and given presentations on them. A progress report is required in week 10. Final reports and presentations are due in week 15. The final deliverable is a postmortem report. Grading is focused on processes and techniques and not simply on counts of detected defects.

Table 2 shows the kind of defects found by student teams over several deliveries of the revamped course. While many defects were not serious, instances of incorrect functionality and system crash were discovered. Table 3 shows that most teams conducted unit, acceptance, usability, and compatibility testing. Less use was made of fuzz, accessibility, security, and performance testing. The results of a survey given in Table 4 show that most of the students were satisfied with the testing project and that they learned a lot. Figure 1 suggests that the revamped course led to increased student enrollment.

This paper convinces the reader that having students test existing real-world, open-source projects is a really good idea. Some readers, however, will be disappointed that the influence of existing test suites and harnesses on the work of student teams is not discussed.

I recommend this paper to software engineering faculty.

Reviewer:  Andy Brooks Review #: CR143550 (1509-0837)
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