Teaching software testing in a modern development environment
Anders Gawell, Anton Kallin · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2019
All developers understand the benefits of testing their code to ensure its functionality. Today’s market is moving further towards design principles where testing is a central or driving force during development. This puts a certain pressure on academia to supply these skills to their students.Recently the course II1302 Projects and project methods at the Royal Institute of Technology in Kista made a concerted effort to introduce the students of the course to these modern concepts. This thesis investigates how areas of testing can effectively be introduced to the students in the course, utilizing a tailored example that takes the area of testing into particular consideration and how to automate it via DevOps-tools provided by a cloud-based service. Further, it also makes an attempt to provide additional material to be used for teaching testing in conjunction with the example provided.The case study covers the development of an example application, meant to mirror a typical student project. It also covers how this was used for teaching the students about the testing areas considered. The covered testing areas include unit testing, integration testing and UI testing. With these given testing areas, the application and an associated learning module was developed for each area in question. Relevant standards, strategies and approaches was also identified for each of these areas.The thesis also presents important properties to take into consideration when developing similar examples in the future, based on the experiences obtained during the study. These include needs such as understandable by inexperienced students, applicability outside the course, adherence to established standards, tools that are simple to use and an architectural structure that allows for testing.Some improvements are also recommended: the students would benefit from learning software testing from an early stage of their studies. The content of the learning modules should also be brought to the students earlier in the course, so it can be applied in their projects at an early stage as well.Further research is also recommended to evaluate the suitability of using other cloud-based environments instead, and to evaluate the applicability of the learning modules for students of varying disabilities.