Mapping Challenges in Teaching-Learning Software Testing: Limitations and Unaddressed Issues in Contemporary Research

Mapping Challenges in Teaching-Learning Software Testing: Limitations and Unaddressed Issues in Contemporary Research

연구 분야: Verification

학회: Annual ACM India Compute Conference

Software testing systematically evaluates and verifies that a software application meets specified requirements and functions correctly. Consequently, proficiency in software testing is a key skill demanded by graduates in the software development industry. Despite its importance, software testing has not received sufficient attention in curricula and teaching practices in undergraduate computer science courses. Teaching-learning software testing brings various challenges for students and instructors, e.g., generating an exhaustive list of test cases, dividing code into testable chunks, fixing the size of projects, etc. Contemporary research reveals that researchers have used TDD to teach software testing and integrated it with programming/SE courses. TDD suggests writing tests before writing code. Gamification and Project-based/ Problem-based learning are also widely used pedagogies for teaching testing. This paper is a meta-review that maps challenges with existing teaching methods/tools to understand current research’s limitations for addressing and unexplored challenges. Analysis of this paper is based on three latest systematic reviews, an additional 28 empirical studies on teaching testing, and three papers discussing challenges in detail.