We were invited to teach about Software Testing to a class called PROSDEV or Professional Development.
We taught 3rd year BS-Computer Science students in De La Salle University. The goal was to expose them to the importance of Quality Assurance Testers and to also share our knowledge about the different testing methods we perform in the company like Usability, Performance, Automation, and JUnit Testing.
The entire QA Team pitched in to help. Volunteering to teach the topics, preparing the presentation for each topic, designing the activities and exercises. With everyone’s help, we were able to finish the preparation.
We wanted the students to have an overview of the testing methods above. We gave a day to each topic.
- Usability Testing
- Performance Testing by JMeter
- Automation Testing by Selenium Webdriver
- Unit Testing by JUnit
The thing is, though, not everything went according to the plan. The road ahead was full of unexpected bumps appearing one after the other. For example, Selenium FirefoxDriver has a strict requirement with Mozilla Firefox version, around ¼ of the class had to update their browsers to the latest version for it to function properly. JMeter Recording failed to work on our test site because it was either blocked by the school’s proxy or the performance of the internet that day.
Nevertheless tackling those issues one by one was enough to solve most of them. The time we were given was quite limited and we did what we could to address them all. There was the student with Mozilla browser version was 49.0.1 but the latest version at the time was 47.0.1. It was weird and it would take too long to downgrade his browser.
It was all worth it when we saw the students actively doing the designed activities which involved them creating their own Usability Testing Experiment, Automation Test Scripts, Unit Scripts ,and a sample of a Performance Test Script.
I believe teachers and students do benefit from each other. It was a give and take experience. I learned something new from my students both technical and personal. And hopefully, they could use concept and tools we discussed. Special mentions to Kevin Clay Badilla and Gino Busok for volunteering to teach, Briane Paul Samson for inviting us to teach, and lastly to the person who pushed this initiative Mr. Allan Tan, CEO of Ideyatech and also a De La Salle University Alumni. We sincerely thank you for the opportunity.
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