Test first, code later: Educating for test driven development: Teaching case

Abstract

As software engineering (SE) and information systems (IS) projects become more and more of collaborative nature in practice, project-based courses become an integral part of IS and SE curricula. One major challenge in this type of courses is students’ tendency to write test cases for their projects at a very late stage, often neglecting code coverage. This paper presents a teaching case of a Test-Driven Development (TDD) workshop that was conducted during a SE course intended for senior undergraduate IS students. The students were asked to write test cases according to TDD principles, and then develop code meeting test cases received from their peers. Students’ perceptions towards TDD were found to be quite positive. This experience indicates that instructing SE courses according to TDD principles, where test cases are written at the beginning of the project, may have positive effect on students’ code development skills and performance in general, and on their understanding of TDD in particular. These findings are informative for both education researchers and instructors who are interested in embedding TDD in IS or SE education.