The Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich Challenge as an Approach to Improve Students Abilities in Test Case Writing

Test cases are a set of test inputs, execution conditions, and expected results developed for a particular objective, such as to exercise a particular program path or to verify compliance with a specific requirement. Test cases that are written by students typically have recurring errors that make difficult to find hidden bugs or lack essential details about the data to be used and the instructions that must be followed. As an attempt to improve the quality of students test cases, we used a "Peanut butter and jelly sandwich challenge", typically used to teach algorithmic thinking, to show students the difficulties one may have repeating a simple set of instructions when they are not precisely described. That activity was adapted to cover contents focused on test case writing.