Bug Hunt: Making Early Software Testing Lessons Engaging and Affordable

Software testing efforts account for a large part of software development costs. However, as educators, we struggle to properly prepare students to perform software testing activities. This struggle is caused by multiple factors: (1) it is challenging to effectively incorporate software testing into an already over-packed curriculum, (2) ad-hoc efforts to teach testing generally happen too late in the students' career, after bad habits have already been developed, and (3) these efforts lack the necessary institutional consistency and support to be effective. To address these challenges we created Bug Hunt, a web-based tutorial to engage students in learning software testing strategies. In this paper we describe the most interesting aspects of the tutorial including the lessons and feedback mechanisms, and the facilities for instructors to configure the tutorial and obtain automatic student assessment. We also present the lessons learned after two years of deployment.