Introducing Testing Practices into Objects and Design Course

Though software testing courses are commonly taught as part of Software Engineering curricula,software testing is still a challenging issue in Software Engineering education. Students frequentlysee testing only as something that happens at the end of the development process. Two challengescan be recognized: "How to make the students recognize the relevance of the testing activity?" and"How to motivate the students on using testing ideas in their projects?". In an attempt to explorethe impact of introducing testing practices throughout development, during the past Fall semesterwe modified the project requirements in a course on object-oriented analysis and design offeredto the undergraduate students in Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. Our ideawas to require the students to start thinking about testing as early as possible, by including testing-relatedpractices in all phases of the development process. This paper presents the details of thetesting approach used in the course and discusses the results we obtained, in terms of the students'attitudes and learning.