Bringing Light into the Dark - Improving Students’ Black-Box Testing Competencies using Game-Design Elements

As software becomes increasingly complex, there is a growing need to enhance quality assurance in software engineering. However, the lack of qualified human resources is a barrier to performing software testing activities in software companies. At the same time, software testing can be considered a tedious task and is often not done at the necessary level of detail, e.g., designing test cases. However, it is crucial for novice programmers and testers to acquire and improve their testing competencies, and to utilize testing techniques, e.g., black-box testing. Teaching software testing is often based on theoretical instructions, resulting in limited practical experience. As a result, students may not develop the necessary testing mindset, highlighting the need for more extensive software testing education. To address this issue, this paper utilizes a design science research approach to implement a gamified learning system that promotes black-box testing competencies with empirical insights from a field test

Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Workshop of the Psychology of Programming Interest Group

This is the Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Workshop of the Psychology of Programming Interest Group (PPIG). This was the first PPIG to be held physically since 2019, following the two online-only PPIGs in 2020 and 2021, both during the Covid pandemic. It was also the first PPIG conference to be designed specifically for hybrid attendance. Reflecting the theme, it was hosted by Music Computing Lab at the Open University in Milton Keynes

Pragmatic software testing education

Software testing is an important topic in software engineering education, and yet highly challenging from an educational perspective: students are required to learn several testing techniques, to be able to distinguish the right technique to apply, to evaluate the quality of their test suites, and to write maintainable test code. In this paper, we describe how we have been adding a pragmatic perspective to our software testing course, and explore students' common mistakes, hard topics to learn, favourite learning activities, and challenges they face. To that aim, we analyze the feedback reports that our team of Teaching Assistants gave to the 230 students of our 2016-2017 software testing course at Delft University of Technology. We also survey 84 students and seven of our teaching assistants on their perceptions. Our results help educators not only to propose pragmatic software testing courses in their faculties, but also bring understanding on the challenges that software testing students face when taking software testing courses.Software EngineeringSoftware Technolog