ENACTEST

Learning capsules for HE and VET providers to prepare future professionals for testing and improving software production

The project

People and society are more and more dependent on software quality, since our social and business lives are digitized. Testing is important for software quality but when not done well, it may result in problematic and erroneous applications. This has a noticeable impact on society, economy and innovation because software is at the basis of digital solutions and tools related to climate change, green economy, demography, digitalization, artificial intelligence, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

The problem should be tacked at the root: education. Our hypothesis is that software testing should be integrated throughout the whole computer science curriculum in the following 4 ways:

•It should be done as early as possible

•It should be done seamlessly in a smooth and continuous way as an inherent part of programming, and not as a separate activity

•It should take into account the needs of industry

•It should be based on testing experts’ mental models and consider students’ learning models that take into account the inherent complexity and intellectual challenges that are comprised by testing.

The consortium will identify and design early and seamless teaching materials for testing that are aligned with industry needs and which take into account also the learning needs and characteristics of students, with the purpose of analyze the feasibility to integrate them and apply them in the curricula of the HE and VET partners and in the training process of SMEs partners in order to improve the learning performance of students and also reduce training needs about testing of industry. As a final result, this will improve the knowledge transfer of testing amongst teams, academia, professionals and novice engineers.

ideas to action

Specific Objectives

1

To identify

the cognitive models for testing that are used by students and experts when they need to deal with testing, specifically for test case design.

2

To categorize

the industry needs and pains with regard to technical and skills of testing in order to identify topics and skills that are fundamental to include in academic curricula.

3

To design

and develop new specific bite-sized testing materials (capsules) for including them into education as early and seamlessly as possible. These take into account the cognitive models of students and at the same time the needs of industry.