From Blackboard to the Office: A Look Into How Practitioners Perceive Software Testing Education [Data]

The teaching-learning process may require specific pedagogical approaches to establish a relationship with industry practices. Recently, some studies investigated the educators' perspectives and the undergraduate courses curriculum to identify potential weaknesses and solutions for the software testing teaching process. However, it is still unclear how the practitioners evaluate the acquisition of knowledge about software testing in undergraduate courses. This study carried out an expert survey with 68 newly graduated practitioners to determine what the industry expects from them and what they learned in academia. The yielded results indicated that those practitioners learned at a similar rate as others with a long industry experience. Also, they studied less than half of the 35 software testing topics collected in the survey and took industry-backed extracurricular courses to complement their learning. Additionally, our findings point out a set of implications for future research, as the respondents' learning difficulties (e.g., lack of learning sources), and the gap between academic education and industry expectations (e.g., certifications).

教与学的过程可能需要采用特定的教学法（pedagogical approaches），以建立与行业实践的有效关联。近期已有部分研究围绕教育工作者的视角与本科课程体系展开调研，旨在挖掘软件测试（software testing）教学过程中的潜在短板及对应解决方案。然而，目前仍不清楚行业从业者如何评估本科阶段学生对软件测试相关知识的掌握情况。本研究针对68名应届毕业从业者开展了专家调研，以明确行业对他们的能力期望，以及他们在学术阶段所习得的知识内容。调研结果表明，该批应届从业者的学习进度与具备长期行业经验的从业者不相上下。此外，他们仅掌握了本次调研涵盖的35个软件测试知识点中的不足半数，并通过参与行业支持的课外课程来补充自身学习。另外，本研究结果还指出了未来研究的若干启示方向，涵盖受访从业者面临的学习困境（如学习资源匮乏），以及学术教育与行业期望之间存在的鸿沟（如职业认证相关的适配问题）。