Software Testing Contest at UT-Dallas

On April 2nd, members of the RS Dallas chapter (Professor W. Eric Wong, Ruizhi Gao, Yihao Li, Shou-Yu Lee, and Xuelin Li) worked with Dr. Mark Paulk in the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at Dallas to conduct a software testing contest. More than 40 students participated in this event.

The contest had two parts. The first one was a 45-minute tutorial to help contestants properly configure their laptops and explain how to write JUint test cases. The second one was a 75-minute hands-on session where contestants were required to design test cases based on the given specifications to test two Java programs. The quality of these tests was determined based on the code coverage (statement and branch) achieved. The rationale behind this is that every part of the program had to be executed at least once in order to have some confidence about the quality of the program. Students whose test cases achieved the top three coverage values won the first, second, and third prize.

The feedback from this contest will help us better organize the First International Software Testing Contest which will be held in conjunction with the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security (QRS) on July 26 in Prague, the Czech Republic.