I promised a long time ago I would write about each of the subjects in the testing education in detail. I've learned that's not as straight forward as I thought. I need to be careful about what I say/imply about the students, course content, exercises etc. (law, policies, respect for the school (content ownership) etc.).
Due to that I lost the energy to do the detailed posts. But, since I receive a lot of questions about curriculum, here's a post describing the curriculum on a more general level. The subjects below are arranged in the same order as they are taught to the students but the items in each of the bullet lists are not sorted in any particular way. Also the lists are not complete in any way, they're basically what I find noteworthy among all the big and small things brought up. Finally from test design and forward it's not as detailed since those subjects haven't been finished/started yet.
Introduction to testing (4 weeks)
- What is testing and why do we test software?
- Note taking and Visualization (mainly mind maps)
- Heuristics
- Basic test design
- Risk
- Oracles
- Coverage
- Bugs and bug reports
- When are you done?
- Tools (e.g. Sikuli, Selenium, VirtualBox, Apache and jMeter)
We started this course by; first thing, first day; give the students a flash game to test, a basic testing mission and a bare minimum of introduction to get started, just to let them get a minimal practical idea of what testing is. The rest of this course was a combination of theory and practical testing; sometimes we started with letting them test and then explained some concept they had used (e.g. oracles) and sometimes we did the other way around; e.g. when explaining risk we first gave a lecture and then let them create a simple risk analysis of an application before they actually got to test it.
The testing in this course was (of course) very superficial and the goal was to introduce many different concepts to give them a "foundation" rather than focus on teaching them one part really well, All in all the students, in one way or another, worked with ~10 different applications including desktop (Windows/iOS depending on their laptop), web, mobile and, in some cases, Linux desktop applications using VirtualBox.
You have to remember that the students in many cases came fresh from high school and/or did not have any technical background so it was just a brief introduction to the concepts and tools mentioned.
You have to remember that the students in many cases came fresh from high school and/or did not have any technical background so it was just a brief introduction to the concepts and tools mentioned.
Think like a tester (6 weeks)
- Critical thinking
- Lateral thinking
- Heuristics
- Bias and Fallacies
- Problem solving
- Test polarities
- Models and mental models
- Information gathering/learning
The general setup was similar to the one used in the introduction course however, during the "think like a tester" course we added a lot of general exercises (e.g. what can you do with a brick, the alien tour exercise and many other) to compliment the theory and practical testing.
During this course, James Bach visited the class in Malmö and my class in Örebro joined in via video. A great opportunity for the students to see one of the experts often referenced, in real life. The highlight was James testing the same application as the students had tested as part of their examination for the introduction course. Malmö had several visits from prominent testers (thanks to Öredev) but I leave it to Martin and Maria to speak about those.
Project contexts (3 weeks)
- Lean and Agile
- Scrum and Kanban
- Waterfall and V/W-modell
- Outsourcing
- Testing in agile
- Common challenges for testers
The most interesting part of this course was probably a pretty detailed lecture and discussion on agile testing followed up by a big exercise where students were asked to identify risk in various contexts (like isolation etc.) and what to do to mitigate these/solve the problem.
Programming (6 weeks)
- Java
- Automation
- File systems
- Programming theory (e.g. compilers, bin/hex and memory allocation)
- TDD/unit tests
Most of this course was used by the students to program their own testing tool (tool to generate and interpret test data). I'm working on publishing some of them. This has by far been the most challenging course making students work day and night to get their examination applications ready.
Test methods (4 weeks)
- Schools of testing
- ISTQB
- TMap
- Context driven testing
- Myths
We teach a context driven mindset and the primary objective with this course was for the students to learn about other ways of looking at testing. Most focus was spent on ISTQB since it's so common and the students got to read the syllabus in detail as well as discuss its strengths, weaknesses, goals etc. in true "critical evaluation style".
Test design (24 weeks, 50%)
- Test approaches
- Test techniques
- Technology
- Heuristics
- Risk based testing
- Coverage
- Oracles
- When to use what?
- Security testing
- Performance and reliability testing
- Usability and UX testing
Test strategy (12 weeks, 50%)
- Risk based test management
- Heuristic test strategy model
- Visualisation
- Testability
- Test framing
- Test processes
Bug reporting (6 weeks, 50%)
- Content
- Different receivers/readers
- Bug pinpointing
- Reasons not to correct errors
- Oracles
- Bug trackers
- Style and structure
- What's a bug and what is not?
Test reporting (6 weeks, 50%)
- Rhetoric
- What are we reporting and why?
- Metrics
- How not to misguide the reader
- Style and structure
- Different receivers/readers/listeners
Testing tools (6 weeks)
- Various categories of tools
- Introduction to common tools
The main reason for this course is students in earlier vocal university software testing educations (not taught by us) felt practical testing and a basic knowledge of tools were the biggest parts lacking in their education. Apart from tools, being the last course we will have to spare some time to talk about practical tips and tricks preparing the students for the internship and working full time as testers.
