Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Testing is one of the most adopted practices in the software industry to reveal failures early in the development process and thus improve the quality of software in production. Despite their relevance, activities related to software testing are usually not taught and practiced enough in undergrad courses, and they are commonly considered demotivating. In this scenario, gamification has been a widely used approach, consisting of using common game elements in non-game contexts, which can make teaching activities and software testing practices more interesting. Therefore, the present work discusses how gamification was applied to support the Software Testing Discipline offered to undergraduate courses on Software Engineering, Computer Science, and Information Technology. A case study was conducted to evaluate the effects of the proposed gamified approach on students’ motivation and learning. In this study, the students had to create JUnit test cases applying domain partitioning criteria using both traditional and gamified approaches. We used Latin Square to perform the study. The results obtained from quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate that (i) there was no significant difference in test coverage when comparing both approaches, (ii) the gamified approach led to higher mutation scores, (iii) and gamification contributed positively to student motivation.
Authors: Eduardo Henrique Nascimento, Roberta Coelho, Charles Madeira, Kláudio Medeiros, Lucas Silva, Carlos Oliveira Neto
Institution: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4403606732