Construction of a syllabus adhering to the teaching of software testing using agile practices

This Research to Practice full paper presents an investigation into the construction of a software testing syllabus, using agile practices as support to make it adherent to teaching by academic skills. In most Brazilian universities, software testing is approached mainly as subtopics of the subjects of Software Engineering or Software Quality; this little contact with the topic can become a discouraging problem for higher education students seeking knowledge about this important area. For the development of the syllabus, we had as reference the competence and syllabus guidelines of the Ministry of Education of Brazil, which is the regulator of the syllabus guidelines for undergraduate and graduate courses in computing in Brazil. In conjunction with these guidelines, other assets in the area were aligned, such as the academic syllabus of the Brazilian Computer Society and the ACM / IEEE, in conjunction with the SWEBOK test-oriented knowledge areas, the Test Maturity Model Integration process areas and guided by agile practices, principles and techniques found in the literature. After this stage, the construction of teaching units for teaching of software testing was carried out. These teaching units were evaluated as part of the software testing teaching model by means a focus group, composed of three doctors who are also specialists in the teaching of software engineering, with experience in teaching and research. Thus, this work also provides a set of skills that we consider favorable to the teaching of software testing, considering several academic syllabuses analyzed. Academic program managers and teachers can use the knowledge generated in this article to facilitate the construction of syllabuses or subjects related to tests, learning objects and academic syllabus. Our findings can also be learning facilitators for competency-based teaching and learning experiences for testing professionals.