Maria R. Ward

The Emerging Role of Software Testing in Curricula

In order to produce quality products, companies require new engineering students that have good problem solving, debugging, and analysis skills. Many graduates enter the work force with exceptional development skills, but lack proficiency in test, debugging, and analysis skills. This is in part because academic curricula emphasize development at the expense of teaching software testing as a formal engineering discipline. The majority of curricula today emphasize the initial phases of a development life cycle, namely: requirements gathering, architecture design, and implementation. The skills which are retained in this area of test are often learned ad-hoc while working on solutions for an implementation-oriented course. The lack of formal test education among graduates forces industry to spend substantial resources to properly educate graduates in the art and science of software testing. The contribution of this paper to the literature includes an evaluation of software testing as an industry profession, a survey of current curricula guidelines, a survey of software testing education in practice today, and a discussion of ongoing efforts to advance the status of software testing in academic curricula through a novel, crowd-sourced, industry-expert, approach to software test education.