Learning environments in software testing education: An overview

Abstract

AbstractNowadays, we heavily depend on software, as we utilize it daily. Bugs in the software can cause significant damage, loss of private data and money, and even loss of human lives. Software testing and quality assurance discipline, which belongs to the software engineering domain, aims to ensure that the software is good enough before its release to the market. Therefore, it is vital to ensure that software engineers are highly trained in this domain. Unfortunately, this discipline is frequently neglected throughout software engineering courses. Students are mostly taught just the theoretical principles of software testing and gain little practical experience. Additionally, the software testing lectures are considered to be dull, especially if they are not followed by practical tasks where the students could apply learned techniques and gain hands‐on experience. Several tools, games, and collaborative learning environments have been proposed to make the lectures more interesting and increase student engagement. The main goal of this article is to provide a systematic survey of such environments, where each environment was evaluated in terms of major software testing topics covered and the approach used to engage the students.