Integrated Software Testing Learning Environment for Training Senior-Level Computer Science Students

Background

Due to the increasingly important role of software testing in software quality assurance, during the last years, the use of testing frameworks that assist the developer during the testing process, and particularly the use of those belonging to the xUnit family, has proven to be invaluable. The production of high-quality and bug-free software products and solutions has gained a crucial importance in the software development industry, always focused to meet the needs of its increasingly more demanding end-users. In the last few years, many software testing techniques and methodologies have emerged to address these challenges, some of them influenced by agile (Beck, K. et al., 2001) and particularly by Extreme Programming (XP) (Beck, K., 2000). These techniques provide a wide set of principles, practices and recommendations for all the tasks involved in the software testing process, from test case design to automation of functional tests. In this context, an overwhelming number of testing frameworks and tools have been developed and are available (many of them under open-source licenses) with the purpose of aiding the developer in testing every particular system aspect written in any programming language imaginable.