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

Abstract

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).