The first Software Testing Education Workshop (STEW) Wednesday, April 1, 2009 Co-located with the ICST 2009 Denver, Colorado, USA

After workshop updates

New: New links to courseware repositories are now added (May 2009). Please see the program below for the links.

 

The organizers would like to thank all the workshop participants for their fruitful contributions to the discussions. We look forward to seeing you all in our future events!

Here are a few pictures from the workshop.

Program

Note that STEW will be organized in a participatory format, different from most common conference and workshop presentations. Our presentations serve to drive discussion. The format will be similar to that of other discussion-intensive workshops such as the Workshop on Teaching Software Testing (WTST).
 

	Time	Talk Title	Speaker(s)	Slides
AM	9:00- 9:45	Introduction to the workshop and check-in by participants	Cem Kaner
	9:45-10:10	Talk 1: Focused Reusable Exercises for Teaching Effective Test Design	Paul Ammann and Jeff Offutt	PDF
	10:10-10:30	Group discussion on Talk 1
	10:30-11:00	Coffee break
	11:00-11:25	Talk 2: Software Testing Tutorials for use in Undergraduate Software Engineering Courses	Sarah Heckman	PDF Link to the tutorials
	11:25-11:45	Group discussion on Talk 2
	11:45-12:10	Talk 3: Making Software Testing Fun: MSOE BugStomp	Walter Schilling and Darrin Rothe
PM	12:10-12:30	Group discussion on Talk 3
	12:30-2:00	Lunch
	2:00-2:25	Talk 4: A realistic and practical testing course lab-work repository co-designed by students	Vahid Garousi	PDF Link to the courseware)
	2:25-2:45	Group discussion on Talk 4
	2:45-3:10	Talk 5: Activities in software testing education: a structure for mapping learning objectives to activity designs	Cem Kaner	PDF
	3:10-3:30	Group discussion on Talk 5
	3:30-4:00	Coffee break
	4:00-5:00	Wrap up and summary of the workshop

Goal

The past few years have seen greater attention to software testing in the software engineering curriculum and a strong employment market for testing-knowledgeable students. One of the challenges in creating testing courses or learning units for inclusion in general software engineering courses is development of engaging, credible, effective courseware (especially, assignments, exercises and labs).

The goal of the Software Testing Education Workshop (STEW) is to bring together both academic and industrial software testing educators to review / develop patterns for test-related courseware and opportunities for broadly sharing this courseware. 

The theme for the first STEW workshop is "Effective testing courseware".

Topics

• Effective testing courseware (especially assignments, exercises and labs)
• What makes testing exercises work? Examples of patterns or underlying principles
• Repositories of open-source or Creative Commons testing courseware (reviews or proposals)

Format

Note that STEW will be organized in a participatory format, different from most common conference and workshop presentations. Our presentations serve to drive discussion. The format will be similar to that of other discussion-intensive workshops such as the Workshop on Teaching Software Testing (WTST).

We expect to spend the morning of this workshop reviewing examples of effective testing exercises, along with materials from other fields (some exemplary materials and efforts to identify common threads or patterns in courseware).

We will spend most of the afternoon in discussion, breaking into small groups if there are enough participants, focusing on identifying underlying patterns and applying them to create new exercises. Toward the end of the workshop, we will discuss repositories--where should we publish these patterns and their applications / instances?

Note: We use "pattern" in the broad sense, without implying the formal structure of the patterns movement.

Call for Presentations / Participation

There are two ways you can contribute to (participate in) STEW 2009:

• Presentations: We invite presentations for the morning and the late afternoon sessions. Please send your presentation proposals to all three organizers (Cem Kaner, Vahid Garousi, and Darko Marinov) including a title and a short abstract. Short position papers are also acceptable.
   
• Participation only: You can also just participate without a presentation in which case you will contribute to the workshop by participating in discussions. Participation in the workshop is by invitation only based on a proposal. We expect to accept 15 participants with an absolute upper bound of 25. Please send a proposal by the deadline date below to all three organizers (Cem Kaner, Vahid Garousi, and Darko Marinov) that identifies who you are, and what your background is.

Important Dates

Organizers

	Cem Kaner kaner at kaner dot com Florida Institute of Technology, USA
	Vahid Garousi vgarousi at ucalgary dot ca University of Calgary, Canada
	Darko Marinov marinov at cs dot uiuc dot edu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

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