More testing should be taught

Shepard, Terry; Lamb, Margaret; Kelly, Diane

doi:10.1145/376134.376180

Cited by 66 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…In general, testing helps reveal failures due to software faults and prevents them from propagating to the final production system, where the cost of fault removal would be far greater (Boehm and Basili 2001;Miller et al 1992;Shepard et al 2001). Studies by IBM and others have shown that to correct a fault after coding is at least ten times as costly as before it, and to correct a production fault is at least 100 times as costly (Perry 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Contributions of tester experience and a checklist guideline to the identification of categories and choices for software testing

et al. 2010

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An early step for most black-box testing methods is to identify a set of categories and choices (or their equivalents) from the specification. The identification is often performed in an ad hoc manner, thus the quality of categories and choices is in doubt. Poorly identified categories and choices will affect the comprehensiveness of test cases. In this paper, we describe several comparative studies using three commercial specifications and discuss the major results. The objectives of our studies are (a) to investigate the differences in the types and amounts of mistakes made between inexperienced and experienced software testers in an ad hoc identification approach and (b) to determine the extent of mistake reduction after discussing the mistakes with the software testers and providing them with an identification checklist.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On average, a software developer spends 40-50% of predelivery development costs on testing in order to achieve reasonable quality levels (Sanders and Curran 1994;Shepard et al 2001). Since testing is expensive and labor intensive, it should be well planned, organized, and executed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contributions of tester experience and a checklist guideline to the identification of categories and choices for software testing

et al. 2010

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“…Despite the importance of the topic, most computer science curricula provide only minimal coverage of the topic. A recent article in Communications of the ACM exhorts faculty to teach more software testing; "Students today are not well equipped to apply widely practiced techniques … They are graduating with a serious gap in the knowledge they need to be effective software developers" [Shepard, Lamb, & Kelly, 2001].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving student performance by evaluating how well students test their own programs

Edwards

2003

J. Educ. Resour. Comput.

132

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Students need to learn more software testing skills. This paper presents an approach to teaching software testing in a way that will encourage students to practice testing skills in many classes and give them concrete feedback on their testing performance, without requiring a new course, any new faculty resources, or a significant number of lecture hours in each course where testing will be practiced. The strategy is to give students basic exposure to test-driven development, and then provide an automated tool that will assess student submissions on-demand and provide feedback for improvement. This approach has been demonstrated in an undergraduate programming languages course using a prototype tool. The results have been positive, with students expressing appreciation for the practical benefits of test-driven development on programming assignments. Experimental analysis of student programs shows a 28% reduction in defects per thousand lines of code.

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“…Besides that, usually only a small portion of the CS curriculum is allocated for testing in comparison to other activities of the software development process [2]. On the other hand, recent experiences have suggested that the testing activity could be taught as soon as possible in the learning process.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, recent experiences have suggested that the testing activity could be taught as soon as possible in the learning process. Earlier mastering of testing concepts and techniques would: (1) improve the reasoning about the program (and its solution), leading to better high quality products; and (2) induce and facilitate the use of testing throughout the software development process, leading to a better high quality process, in contrast to the current practices.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrated teaching of programming foundations and software testing

Barbosa¹,

Silva²,

Corte³

et al. 2008

2008 38th Annual Frontiers in Education Conference

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-The importance of software testing is widely recognized, but usually only a small portion of the Computer Science (CS) curriculum is allocated for teaching it. Some experiences have suggested that the teaching of software testing should begin as early as possible so an adequate culture of testing could be created. One way to achieve this is addressing testing practices in conjunction with programming concepts in introductory CS courses. In this paper we explore such idea, working on the integration between the teaching of software testing along with the teaching of programming foundations. We discuss the development of an educational module, and its related learning materials, for integrating such knowledge domains. Besides that, we propose PROGTEST -a Webbased environment for the submission and automatic evaluation of practical programming assignments based on testing activities, aiming at providing an adequate feedback to evaluate the learners' performance concerning programming and testing.

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More testing should be taught

Cited by 66 publications

References 11 publications

Contributions of tester experience and a checklist guideline to the identification of categories and choices for software testing

Contributions of tester experience and a checklist guideline to the identification of categories and choices for software testing

Improving student performance by evaluating how well students test their own programs

Integrated teaching of programming foundations and software testing

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