USING A PROJECT OF PROCESS IMPROVEMENT AS LEARNING STRATEGY IN A SOFTWARE TESTING COURSE

Oftentimes, the projects undertaken by software development emerging companies are oriented to build software solutions for specific customers or provide services in a particular sector. Their processes are thus focused in satisfying requirements but in disregard of the quality assurance and the formal stages of the development lifecycle. Testing processes are important during the quality certification of products and services, because the finding of errors has a greater impact as progress is made in the development stages.

The transformation experimented by such small companies when their customers and/or their services grow, lead them to search for improvements in the development processes to assure quality. Soon, they realize that the certification processes and the implementation of quality models are suitable for big companies, but represent an important challenge for emerging companies. Consequently, they quit these initiatives and loose time and capital.

In this paper, we present a project-based learning strategy used in a Software Testing course. The project consists of the definition and execution of a three-staged process to improve the software lifecycle in a small company.

The three stages are:
i) evaluation of the current company testing process,
ii) elaboration of roadmap for improvement of the processes and
iii) definition of assessment mechanisms to evaluate implementation of the roadmap.

The social impact of the process has been made evident over a real case study. We present the results of applying these three stages in an actual company.