Hey Teachers, Teach Those Kids Some Software Testing

Abstract

Software testing is generally acknowledged to be an important weapon in the arsenal of software engineers to produce correct and reliable software systems. However, given the importance of the topic, little is known about where software engineers get their testing knowledge and skills from. Is this through (higher) education, training programmes in the industry, or rather is it self-taught? In this paper, we investigate the curricula of 100 highly ranked universities and survey 51 software engineers to shed light on the state-of-the-practice in software testing education, in terms of both academic education and education of software engineers in the industry.