Teaching Bug Advocacy through Flipped Classroom

Software testing plays a critical role in the development workflow. Nowadays, the significance of teaching software testing principles is recognized to a greater extent than ever before.The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to investigate the effectiveness of using a flipped classroom-based context to teach software bug advocacy, and (2) to provide the student's perspective on using flipped classroom to learn how to advocate for a bug. A seminar activity dedicated to bug reports and how to advocate for a bug is the framework for this investigation, with students being split into teams with the aim to perform two major activities: poster creation for one of the strategies from the RIMGEN mnemonics and providing advocacy strategies for a 3 years old bug. The created artifacts and the answers to a questionnaire dedicated to the learning experience are used as tools to analyze and provide answers to research questions. The results show that flipped classroom-based learning is effective in teaching how to advocate for a software bug. Around 87.75\% of students agreed that the poster creation activity helped them better retain the information. A percentage of 61.22\% students agreed that time was spent more effectively in class since the text was read outside the classroom, and 82.66\% of students also agree that this type of learning provides them with the opportunity to communicate with other students.