Integrated teaching of programming foundations and software testing

Abstract

The importance of software testing is widely recognized, but usually only a small portion of the computer science (CS) curriculum is allocated for teaching it. Some experiences have suggested that the teaching of software testing should begin as early as possible so an adequate culture of testing could be created. One way to achieve this is addressing testing practices in conjunction with programming concepts in introductory CS courses. In this paper we explore such idea, working on the integration between the teaching of software testing along with the teaching of programming foundations. We discuss the development of an educational module, and its related learning materials, for integrating such knowledge domains. Besides that, we propose PROGTEST - a Web-based environment for the submission and automatic evaluation of practical programming assignments based on testing activities, aiming at providing an adequate feedback to evaluate the learnerspsila performance concerning programming and testing.