More testing should be taught

Reviewer: Haim I. Kilov

This interesting short paper has a somewhat misleading title. The authors urge software engineering educators to pay much more attention to teaching verification and validation (V&V), of which testing is a subset. The authors advocate specification-based testing and software inspections. They are quite eloquent about the inadequacy of the current state of affairs in V&V, both in academia and industry, and describe in some detail how V&V has been successfully taught at both undergraduate and graduate levels at the Royal Military College of Canada since 1992. The approaches to teaching described in the paper (such as using precise specifications, and the emphasis on inspections instead of testing) are very useful. At the same time, it is not clear from the paper whether writing, reading and inspecting specifications—essential for V&V—have been taught. The concepts underlying a disciplined approach to software specification, design, and development have been made explicit in the courses, but it is not clear whether this approach—striving for clarity and understandability at all stages of information management—has been systematically enforced. V&V satisfies the criteria formulated by David Parnas for including a topic into the software engineering curriculum: it was there 30 years ago (as can be seen from the Proceedings of the first Software Engineering Conference [1], which is mentioned, but not discussed further, by the authors) and will probably be there 30 years from now. Most of the recent “inventions” in the V&V area were mentioned, perhaps tersely and under different names, in [1], and both industry and academia could use this as a source of inspiration, not only for V&V, but for software engineering in general. Online Computing Reviews Service