Abstract
Software testing is regarded as a key activity in the software development cycle, as it helps information technology professionals to design good quality software. Thus, this is an essential activity for the software industry, although with all its nuances high priority is still not being given to learning about it at an academic level. The purpose of this work is to investigate a teaching strategy for software testing which involves acquiring academic skills within a curriculum based on active teaching methodologies. A teaching model was designed for this to coordinate the different areas of a subject, and then a controlled quasi-experiment was carried out in a post-graduate course to evaluate the application of this model. The results obtained demonstrate that there was a considerable learning gain in the experimental group that adopted the teaching approach when compared with the control group that relied on a traditional approach. The student t-test was employed to determine the learning efficiency.
Highlights
Software testing plays a critical role in both building software quality and determining whether or not the desired quality has been achieved
The results obtained from the rejection of hypotheses H01, H02, H03 and H04 suggest that this approach has a higher learning effectiveness than what can be achieved by a traditional classroom methodology, since the average grades obtained by the experimental group during the evaluations were significantly higher than those of the control group
Different statistical tests were used for different research questions in this quasi-experiment, while taking into account the variance of data from the sample in that teaching unit
Summary
Software testing plays a critical role in both building software quality and determining whether or not the desired quality has been achieved. Vam Damn [4] states that, as well as having technical skills, software testers, must have social skills and Veenendaal [5] stresses that testers must have personal skills so that they can influence people and communicate in a way that makes them feel they are an essential, part of a software project. For this reason, in this study, a teaching approach was adopted for software testing that was based on active teaching methodologies and aimed at making improvements. The students must know the basic concepts of software engineering when related to testing and quality control.
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