Experience with teaching black-box testing in a computer science/software engineering curriculum

Software testing is a popular and important technique for improving software quality. There is a strong need for universities to teach testing rigorously to students studying computer science or software engineering. This paper reports the experience of teaching the classification-tree method as a black-box testing technique at the University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, and Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. It aims to foster discussion of appropriate teaching methods of software testing

On the identification of categories and choices for specification-based test case generation

The category-partition method and the classification-tree method help construct test cases from specifications. In both methods, an early step is to identify a set of categories (or classifications) and choices (or classes). This is often performed in an ad hoc manner due to the absence of systematic techniques. In this paper, we report and discuss three empirical studies to investigate the common mistakes made by software testers in such an ad hoc approach. The empirical studies serve three purposes: (a) to make the knowledge of common mistakes known to other testers so that they can avoid repeating the same mistakes, (b) to facilitate researchers and practitioners develop systematic identification techniques, and (c) to provide a means of measuring the effectiveness of newly developed identification techniques. Based on the results of our studies, we also formulate a checklist to help testers detect such mistakes