Teaching the New Software Testers – an Experiment
The many facets of what it meant to introduce a software testing course into UW Bothell – professor and students give an experience report and look to the future
Presented by David Socha, Assistant Professor, University of Washington, Bothell
As a new professor at the University of Washington Bothell I decided to put together a new course on Software Testing – a course that had never been taught here, and that I had never taught. Nor had I ever explicitly acted in the role of software tester during my 19 years working in the software industry.
Why do such a crazy thing? How did the course turn out? What were the good and the bad, the memorable and the inspiring from this course? How did it change the students, and the instructor? What did it “mean” for this course to be taught at the University of Washington Bothell? What might this “mean” for the software testing community in this area?
If you are interested in any of these questions, or might want to be involved in the co-design and execution of such a course next year, come hear David Socha and some of his students give an experience report on this autumn quarter 2010 course at the University of Washington Bothell.
About our speaker: As of September, 2010 David Socha is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Bothell in the Computing and Software Systems program. He grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, and in the process became eco-literate (e.g. a systems thinker). This deepened as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he made his own luck and spent a year as a field assistant in the Galapagos Islands as a research assistant studying the Galapagos land iguanas, and then earned a BS in Zoology. After earning a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, David spent 19 years working in a variety of software development organizations moving from being an individual contributor, to managing groups of software developers, to being an agile coach. Recognizing the Teacher in him, he now is a tenure-track professor at UW Bothell working to make a difference. His areas of interest focus on the human side of software development, innovation, design, biomimicry… and perhaps even software testing.
Presentation Slide Deck: Teaching the New Software Testers
