The impact of Software Testing education on code reliability: An empirical assessment

Autor(es)

Lazzarini Lemos, Otavio Augusto ^[1] ; Silveira, Fabio Fagundes ^[1] ; Ferrari, Fabiano Cutigi ^[2] ; Garcia, Alessandro ^[3]

Afiliação do(s) autor(es)

^[1] Fed Univ Sao Paulo SJ dos Campos, Sci & Technol Dept, Sao Jose Dos Campos - Brazil

^[2] Univ Fed Sao Carlos, Comp Dept, Sao Carlos, SP - Brazil

^[3] Pontifical Catholic Univ Rio de Janeiro, Informat Dept, Rio De Janeiro - Brazil

• Tipo de documento: Artigo Científico
• Fonte: JOURNAL OF SYSTEMS AND SOFTWARE; v. 137, p. 497-511, MAR 2018.
• Citações Web of Science: 1

Resumo

Software Testing (ST) is an indispensable part of software development. Proper testing education is thus of paramount importance. Indeed, the mere exposition to ST knowledge might have an impact on programming skills. In particular, it can encourage the production of more correct- and thus reliable - code. Although this is intuitive, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies about such effects. Concerned with this, we have conducted two investigations related to ST education: (1) a large experiment with students to evaluate the possible impact of ST knowledge on the production of reliable code; and (2) a survey with professors that teach introductory programming courses to evaluate their level of ST knowledge. Our study involved 60 senior-level computer science students, 8 auxiliary functions with 92 test cases, a total of 248 implementations, and 53 professors of diverse subfields that completed our survey. The investigation with students shows that ST knowledge can improve code reliability in terms of correctness in as much as 20%, on average. On the other hand, the survey with professors reveals that, in general, university instructors tend to lack the same knowledge that would help students increase their programming skills toward more reliable code. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (AU)

• Processo FAPESP: 13/25356-2 - Evolução e avaliação de técnicas de teste e de busca de código-fonte no desenvolvimento de software contemporâneo
• Beneficiário: Otávio Augusto Lazzarini Lemos
• Modalidade de apoio: Auxílio à Pesquisa - Regular
• Processo FAPESP: 15/12787-0 - Reparo automático de software via busca de código-fonte
• Beneficiário: Otávio Augusto Lazzarini Lemos
• Modalidade de apoio: Bolsas no Exterior - Pesquisa