We recommend the Residence Inn by Marriott (http://www.melbourneresidenceinn.com/), located at 1430 S. Babcock Street in Melbourne, FL. Please call 321-723-5740 to book your room by January 13 and ask for the special WTST rates.
- Wed. & Thur. : $109.00 per room per night plus 11% tax
- Fri. & Sat. : $89.00 per room per night plus 11% tax
All reservations must be guaranteed with a credit card by January 13,2010 at 6:00 pm. If rooms are not reserved, they will be released for general sale. Following that date reservations can only be made based upon availability.
CANCELLATION POLICY:
If you must cancel your reservation after 5:00 pm, 5 days prior to arrival, you will forfeit the deposit of one-night room charges as a cancellation fee.
CHECK-IN/CHECK-OUT:
Check-in time is at 4:00 p.m. and check out time is at 12:00 noon and early check-in and/or late check-outs are not available.
ROOMS AND AMENITIES:
- Studio Room With A King Bed & Sofabed
- Complimentary Hot Breakfast Buffet
- Complimentary Wireless/Wired Internet Access
- Daily Housekeeping Service
- Fully Equipped Kitchens In All Rooms:
- Full Size Refrigerator, Microwave, Stovetop, and Coffee Maker
- Outdoor Heated Pool
- Exercise Facility
- Outdoor SportCourt
- 100% Nonsmoking Hotel
- LG 32" Flat Panel LCD HDTV
This property also has 1 and 2 bedroom suites but does not offer discounted rates for them. Nevertheless, you may prefer to split the cost of a larger room to share with another attendee at a savings. Contact the hotel to make arrangements.
The
Workshop on Teaching Software Testing is concerned with the practical
aspects of teaching university-caliber software testing courses to
academic or commercial students.
This year, we are particularly
interested in teaching test-driven programming or other approaches to
implementation-level testing.
We
invite participation by:
There
is no fee to attend this meeting. You pay for your seat through the
value of your participation. Participation in the workshop is by
invitation based on a proposal. We expect to accept 15 participants
with an absolute upper bound of 25.
WTST
is a workshop, not a typical conference. Our
presentations serve to drive discussion. The target readers of
workshop papers are the other participants, not archival readers. We
are glad to start from already-published papers, if they are
presented by the author and they would serve as a strong focus for
valuable discussion.
In
a typical presentation, the presenter speaks 10 to 90 minutes,
followed by discussion. There is no fixed time for discussion. Past
sessions' discussions have run from 1 minute to 4 hours. During the
discussion, a participant might ask the presenter simple or detailed
questions, describe consistent or contrary experiences or data,
present a different approach to the same problem, or (respectfully
and collegially) argue with the presenter. In 20 hours of formal
sessions, we expect to cover six to eight presentations.
We
also have lightning presentations, time-limited to 5 minutes (plus
discussion). These are fun and they often stimulate extended
discussions over lunch and at night.
Presenters
must provide materials that they share with the workshop under a
Creative Commons license, allowing reuse by other teachers. Such
materials will be posted at http://www.wtst.org.
BACKGROUND
AND SUGGESTED TOPICS
Our focus is on
implementation-level testing. We are interested in the types of
tests that programmers write to understand and assess their own code.
These include unit tests and lower-level integration tests.
Presentations on “acceptance-test driven development” are
out of scope of this meeting.
We
were excited by the rise of interest in implementation-level testing
that came with the agile development movement. Unfortunately,
test-driven development seems to have been lightly adopted by the
agile development community; even less formal approaches to unit
testing appear to be minority practices ( see for example,
http://www.agilealliance.org/show/1546,
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/256619/unit_testing_doomed,
and http://agile.dzone.com/videos/scott-ambler-agile-2009).
Our impression is that unit testing has been gradually becoming less
visible and less central in the agile community. Practitioners
believe it is hard to do this well
(http://www.ambysoft.com/surveys/practices2009.html)
and we’ve been finding that it is hard to teach it well.
Perhaps
part of the problem is that the books that introduced unit testing to
new and relatively junior programmers are out of date. The newer
books and online articles that we’ve seen are written for more
experienced programmers. Most writing that we’ve seen focuses
on test implementation (such as how to use the tools, how to create
maintainable test suites, how to test private variables, etc.) rather
than on what tests to run and why to run them. We haven’t seen
much that is suitable for university courses that would be
appropriate for average students or for commercial introductions to
the practice of TDD.
So,
what can we use, or what can we develop for use in our courses?
Here
are *examples* of ideas that might be interesting to the
participants at WTST:
- Course
design: We’re looking for experience reports, not theory.
We’re interested in your report if you have made a significant
effort at teaching implementation-level testing and have insight
into your successes, failures and challenges.
- Online
course design: There are a lot of programming courses online.
Are any of them good? Can we adapt their instructional methods to
create online courses that emphasize implementation-level testing?
(Not many universities will teach such courses—some good
online courses can create learning opportunities for a broader pool
of university students and commercial students.)
- Instructive
examples: Do you have particularly successful activities or
assignments? What are their details? What do students learn? How do
you know? What problems do students have in attempting these and how
do you recommend that we deal with them (if we reuse your activity)?
- Resources
for implementation-level test-related activities and assignments:
we have all heard of MERLOT and NSDL and several other
repositories of learning objects. Have you found any good resources
for software testing in any of these repositories? What have you
found? How did you search? Can you give a demo, including your
search strategy?
- Assessment:
What techniques should we use to determine whether our assignments
and activities are working? Have you used these assessment
techniques? Can you give examples?
- Qualitative
assessment methods: From sloppy anecdotal reports to rigorous
qualitative design. How can we use qualitative methods to conduct
research on the teaching of computing, including software testing?
- Differences
in characteristics of learners that predict differences in
effectiveness of activities or assignments
TO
ATTEND AS A PRESENTER
Please
send a proposal BY DECEMBER 15, 2009 to Cem Kaner <kaner@cs.fit.edu>
that identifies who you are, what your background is, what you would
like to present, how long the presentation will take, any special
equipment needs, and what written materials you will provide. Along
with traditional presentations, we will gladly consider proposed
activities and interactive demonstrations.
We
will begin reviewing proposals on December 1. We encourage early
submissions. It is unlikely but possible that we will have accepted a
full set of presentation proposals by December 15.
Proposals
should be between two and four pages long, in PDF format. We will
post accepted proposals to http://www.wtst.org.
We
review proposals in terms of their contribution to knowledge of HOW
TO TEACH software testing. Proposals that present a purely
theoretical advance in software testing, with weak ties to teaching
and application, will not be accepted. Presentations that reiterate
materials you have presented elsewhere might be welcome, but it is
imperative that you identify the publication history of such work.
By
submitting your proposal, you agree that, if we accept your proposal,
you will submit a scholarly paper for discussion at the workshop by
January 15, 2010. Workshop papers may be of any length and follow any
standard scholarly style. We will post these at http://www.wtst.org
as they are received, for workshop participants to review before the
workshop.
TO
ATTEND AS A NON-PRESENTING PARTICIPANT:
Please
send a message by DECEMBER 15, 2008, to Cem Kaner <kaner@cs.fit.edu>
that describes your background and interest in teaching software
testing. What skills or knowledge do you bring to the meeting that
would be of interest to the other participants?
ADVISORY
BOARD MEETING
Florida
Tech's Center
for Software Testing Education & Research has been
developing a collection of hybrid and online course materials for
teaching
black box software testing. We have NSF funding to
adapt these materials for implementation by a broader audience. We
have formed an Advisory Board to guide this adaptation
and the associated research on the effectiveness of the materials in
diverse contexts. We are interested in having a few new members. The
Board will meet before WTST, on January 28, 2010.
This
year’s meeting will focus on supporting/creating research
collaborations by members of the Board. Our primary interest lies in
expanding the community doing research/development on software
testing education.
- The
Center is interested in being involved in new proposals, but we want
to foster good ideas at this meeting whether they involve the Center
or not.
- The
Center is interested in encouraging adoption, evaluation and
improvement of the course materials that we’ve developed, but
again, we are primarily interested in fostering good ideas at this
meeting, not in promoting any particular set of ideas or materials.
- The
Center’s work has primarily focused on system-level black box
testing. The Advisory Board meeting is open to system-level ideas as
well as implementation-level.
If you are interested attending as a Board Member:
- If
you are not already a member of the Board, please
read this invitation and submit an application.
- If
you are already a member and are willing to come on January 28,
please let us know ASAP.
- In
either case, please let us know whether you plan to stay for WTST.
Most
of our NSF funding has been exhausted. We have some additional money
for this from donations. However at this point, we can only afford to
cover hotel costs of advisory board members who attend the
meeting and WTST. We cannot reimburse airfare. We’ll discuss
this in more detail in correspondence with the Advisory Board.
Acknowledgements
Support
for this meeting comes from the National Science Foundation, the
Association for Software Testing and the Harris Institute for Assured
Information at the Florida Institute of Technology.
The
hosts of the meeting are:
Opinions expressed at WTST or published in connection with WTST do not recessarily reflect the views of NSF. WTST is often co-sponsored by the Association for Software Testing (AST) .