Developing software to solve real-world problems is an essential skill that every software practitioner must possess. However, software built without being properly tested can cause financial losses or even catastrophic consequences. As software testing is a fundamental approach to ensure not only the software satisfies the requirements, but also it is secure, reliable, and safe to use, the IEEE Reliability Society Dallas Chapter, UT Dallas Computer Science Department, along with other industry sponsors hosted an IEEE Software Testing Contest on November 7, 2020, to promote advanced software testing theories, techniques, and tools. The event was organized by UT Dallas CS Professor, Dr. W. Eric Wong, the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Reliability (TRel or TR) and the Founding Director of the UT Dallas Advanced Research Center for Software Testing and Quality Assurance, and UT Dallas CS Professor, Dr. Jey Veerasamy, Director of the Center for Computer Science Education & Outreach (CCSEO). Several Ph.D. students in Dr. Wong’s research group also assisted in the organization of the contest.
The contest was divided into high school group and college group. The contestants of both groups needed to complete their contest individually. During the contest, each contestant was given the source code of two Java programs, and they were asked to create test cases by using JUnit. The final score of each contestant was determined based on the code coverage and mutation score achieved by the test cases they created.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event was hosted online to provide a safe contest environment. To help contestants understand the contest and get familiar with the testing theories, techniques, and tools they need to use, a practice session was provided. The practice session was publicly accessible for all contestants, and it contained a series of educational slides that explains the concepts used in the contest, such as test case, JUnit, code coverage, and mutation score. The practice session also offered two Java sample programs to let contestants gain hands-on testing experience before the actual contest. On November 7, from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm, a JUnit tutorial was hosted to provide a more in-depth view of the testing framework JUnit, and the contest was hosted from 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm with nearly 350 contestants.
The winners of the College Group:
The winners of the High School Group:
Every contestant also received a certificate of completion from the IEEE Reliability Society, Dallas Chapter and Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, signed by Professor Dr. D.T. Huynh, Head of the Computer Science Department, Professor Dr. Jey Veerasamy, and Professor Dr. W. Eric Wong.
1st: Jonathan Browne
2nd: Mohammadreza Haghpanah
3rd: Anshul Pardhi
1st: George Zhang
2nd: Kane Dong
3rd: Chong Zhen Wong
We would like to give special acknowledgments to our sponsor, State Farm, for their generosity to provide awards to the contest winners.
We also thank Mooctest, Inc. (Nanjing, China) for providing the Mooctest.net platform to facilitate the contest, student helpers from the University of Texas at Dallas (Linghuan Hu, Shou-Yu Lee, Dongcheng Li, and Zizhao Chen) and those from Nanjing University (Professor Dr. Zhenyu Chen, Yuan Zhao, Xiaobo Xue, and Quanjun Zhang) for all their support.
