An Experience on Applying Learning Mechanisms for Teaching Inspection and Software Testing

Abstract

Educational modules, concise units of study capable of integrating theoretical/practical content and supporting tools, are relevant mechanisms to improve learning processes. In this paper we briefly discuss the establishment of mechanisms to ease the development of educational modules - a Standard Process for Developing Educational Modules and an Integrated Modeling Approach for structuring their learning content. The proposed mechanisms have been investigated in the development of the ITonCode module - an educational module for teaching inspection and testing techniques. Aiming at evaluating the module we have replicated an extended version of the Basili & Selby experiment, originally used for comparing V&V techniques, now considering the educational context. The obtained results were mainly analyzed in terms of the student's uniformity in detecting existent faults, giving us very preliminar evidences on the learning effectiveness provided by the module produced.