Improving Software Testing Education via Industry Sponsored Contests

This Innovative Practice, Work in Progress Paper presents how we improve software testing education via industry sponsored contests. Over the past decades, we have built software to improve our efficiency, reliability, and safety in production, business, daily life, etc. These goals, however, cannot be accomplished if the software is not properly tested. Some universities provide classes to teach students the fundamental knowledge and techniques of software testing. However, these classes often ignore industry practices and can hardly offer real-world testing experiences to students. To address this, we partnered with industry sponsors to design and host several software testing contests along with software testing tutorials. Through the contests and tutorials, we brought real-world testing and tool experience to the students and provided excellent opportunities for them to practice their learned testing techniques to overcome industry testing challenges.