How Students Unit Test: Perceptions, Practices, and Pitfalls
Gina R. Bai, Justin Smith, Kathryn T. Stolee
Abstract
Unit testing is reported as one of the skills that graduating students lack, yet it is an essential skill for professional software developers. Understanding the challenges students face during testing can help inform practices for software testing education. To that end, we conduct an exploratory study to reveal students' perceptions of unit testing and challenges students encounter when practicing unit testing. We surveyed 54 students from two universities and gave them two testing tasks, one involving black-box test design and one involving white-box test implementation. For the tasks, we used two software projects from prior work in studying test-first development among software developers. We quantitatively analyzed the survey responses and test code properties, and qualitatively identified the mistakes and smells in the test code. We further report on our experience running this study with students.