Bug Hunt: Making Early Software Testing Lessons Engaging and Affordable

Software testing efforts account for a large part of the software development costs. We still struggle, however, to properly prepare students to perform software testing activities. This struggle is caused by multiple factors: 1) it is challenging to effectively incorporate software testing into an already over-packed curriculum, 2) ad-hoc efforts to teach testing happen too late in the students' career, after bad habits have already been developed, and 3) these efforts lack the necessary institutional consistency and support to be effective. To address these challenges we created Bug Hunt, a web-based tutorial to engage students in the learning of software testing strategies. In this paper we describe the most interesting aspects of the tutorial including the lessons designed to engage students, and the facilities for instructors to configure the tutorial and obtain automatic student assessment. We also present the lessons learned after the first year of deployment. Categories a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Sebastian G. Elbaum, Suzette Person, Jonathan Dokulil, Matthew Jorde
• Keywords: ICSE 2007, Incorporate Software Testing, Software Engineering, Software Testing Efforts, Software Testing Strategies