An Experience on Applying Learning Mechanisms for Teaching Inspection and Software Testing

Educational modules, concise units of study capable of integrating theoretical/practical content and supporting tools, are relevant mechanisms to improve learning processes. In this paper we briefly discuss the establishment of mechanisms to ease the development of educational modules - a Standard Process for Developing Educational Modules and an Integrated Modeling Approach for structuring their learning content. The proposed mechanisms have been investigated in the development of the ITonCode module - an educational module for teaching inspection and testing techniques. Aiming at evaluating the module we have replicated an extended version of the Basili & Selby experiment, originally used for comparing V&V techniques, now considering the educational context. The obtained results were mainly analyzed in terms of the student´s uniformity in detecting existent faults, giving us very preliminar evidences on the learning effectiveness provided by the module produced.