Software testing is indispensable in software development, yet often overlooked, contributing to a shortage of expertise in the software industry. Despite efforts to improve teaching approaches at the university level, challenges persist, particularly in bridging the gap between theory and practice and better preparing students for their future careers.
Anna Rita Fasolino from the University of Napoli Federico II, Italy, one of the ENACTEST project researchers, recently illustrated the current trends in software testing education in the keynote “Beyond the Class: A look into current trends in software testing education” held at the 17th International Workshop on Search-Based and Fuzz Testing, SBFT 2024, organized in Lisbon, Portugal, on 14th and 15th of April 2024, in conjunction with the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2024).
In her talk prof. Fasolino provided a closer look at how software testing is taught at the academic level, considering the perspectives of students and teachers. She described the most common challenges that students experience when taking a software testing course. Then she gave voice to teachers, reporting the approaches they usually adopt in software testing courses and the challenges they face.
Therefore, she illustrated the main categories of approaches proposed in the literature to aid software testing education, including innovative pedagogical approaches based on active-learning, specific testing teaching practices that help to increase the students’ engagement in doing testing, software tools, environments and gamification approaches which make testing learning experiences more effective.
For giving an idea of how software testing is taught at Academic level, she summarized the state of software testing in education in different parts of the world and presented the most recent findings of a mapping study that investigated the state of the practice of testing education in four European countries, based on the results of a mapping study conducted by the ENACTEST researchers. In the conclusion, Anna Rita discussed the future perspectives of Software Testing education, remarking the gaps that still need to be filled, including the necessity to find effective ways to incorporate emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, Generative AI, Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud computing into the software testing lessons and practical labs.
