ITR/SY+PE: Improving the Education of Software Testers

Florida Institute Of Technology, Melbourne FL

Investigators

Abstract

0113539 Kaner Florida Institute of Technology "Improving the Education of Software Testers" This is a project that lays the groundwork for significant improvements in the quality of academic and commercial courses in software testing. This is new ground since the skills used in the field are not well identified and there are few collections of exercises or drills designed to help polish those skills. Software testing is an important area of work within information technology, but it has been largely ignored within the educational community. As a result, the software industry faces a shortage of appropriately educated people to do this work. This project develops foundational material for teaching introductory and advanced classes on software testing, including: a collection of examples of software errors (posted on a web site, well-described, with screen shots, and suitable for use in class), identification and descriptions of specific skills involved in software testing (published at conferences and in articles that are available on the web), sample exercises for students (for use as course assignments or for self-paced study) and a smaller separate collection for teachers (for possible use in exams), free software versions of classroom-level versions of useful testing tools (a "classroom version" is intended to teach the concept of that kind of tool, and to handle tasks that are as complex as the student might run into as an undergraduate), research (and reports on the results of the research) on the usefulness of Whittaker's software fault model as an organizing structure for presenting a wide range of key testing techniques in class, extension of Kaner & Bach's characterizations of testing styles/strategies, bringing together research and practitioner literature into a structure useful for presenting a wide range of key testing strategies in class, and workshops (and an email discussion group) on the teaching of software testing. The core societal benefit of this work lies in its high potential for improvement of software testing and through that, software quality.