Incorporating real-world industrial testing projects in software testing courses: Opportunities, challenges, and lessons learned

In order to effectively teach software engineering students how to solve real-world problems, if possible, students should have the chance of working with and testing “real-world” industrial software systems during their courses. In a previous article, we presented a comprehensive software-testing lab exercise repository in which real software systems and test tools were incorporated to give students the chance of learning industry-standard tools (such as JUnit and IBM Rational Functional Tester). As the next step in our on-going efforts to improve the learning experience of students in testing courses, we have incorporated “real-world” industrial testing projects in a graduate-level software testing course in the past three years (2008–2010). The experience and the outcomes of these industrial-caliber projects have been very satisfying to the stakeholders. We report in this article some details about those projects and also discuss the opportunities, challenges, and lessons learned in those projects.