A diagnosis on software testing education in the Brazilian Universities

A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation of Teaching Software Testing in Software Quality Assurance Subject during a Post-Graduate Computer Science Course

“…Academic curricula in computing must be constantly updated, so they can keep abreast with the constantly evolving needs of the software industry. The methods of learning and academic content must also be updated so that students can acquire market-oriented job skills [9], [16].…”

“…Once the required skills had been determined, it was possible to form a syllabus that could include all the necessary subjects [9]. It was suggested that knowledge could be disseminated in a progressive way more effectively, if the content referring to software tests was divided into 4 teaching units, as can be seen in Table 1.…”

“…These include the following: (i) a systematic mapping that helped to locate topics and academic content related to software tests [6], (ii) an academic curriculum (syllabus) was drawn up that was designed for teaching Software Testing [7], and also served as a knowledge management instrument that could be assessed by the control and experimental groups; (iii) a teaching plan based on an active methodology [8] together with strategies adopted to optimize the students' learning experience. These were employed as a means of teaching the topics in the experimental group, which had to be coordinated by the teaching model designed for this work, (iv) there was a diagnosis of some aspects of software testing/ teaching in the main Brazilian universities [9], and, finally, (v) after the experimental group was formed, there were several findings and good practices for remote teaching based on active methods [10]. When taken together, these factors served as the basis for conducting the quasi-experiment which is outlined in this article.…”