The use of gamification to support the teaching-learning of software exploratory testing: an experience report based on the application of a framework

Abstract

This Research to Practice Full Paper presents exploratory testing, an approach that has become quite relevant in the testing software, growing its application in the industrial scenario. The main reason for that is the emerging utilization of agile practices in the software development process to satisfy the needs of the market (Time to Market), which is essential for a company to remain active in the market. However, the systematic mapping study performed found few studies about the application of exploratory testing, a subject little discussed in the academic context. For this reason, this work uses gamification as a systematic strategy in exploratory test teaching and learning in the form of an experiment with two classes. One class has undergraduate students in Computer Science, and the other has students who graduated as Computer Technicians. The aim is to engage students to obtain a better performance, preparing them to use that test approach in the industrial and academic context. As a result, students achieved good overall performance; with reports from students that gamification facilitated and significantly collaborated to achieve a better performance converging with the quantitative data obtained. This can be evidenced mainly by the fact that both runs of the experiment (classes) reached a percentage higher than 70% of achievement, a great overall performance analyzed by the ratio of medals obtained by participation.