A pragmatic look at education and training of software test engineers: Further cooperation of academia and industry is needed

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state of software testing education in academia and industry, highlighting the need for increased collaboration and proposing recommendations to enhance training effectiveness.

Contribution

It offers a pragmatic overview of software testing education, combining extensive experience to identify gaps and suggest improvements for academia-industry cooperation.

Findings

Significant resources are invested in testing education both in universities and industry.

There is a gap and limited cooperation between academic training and industry practices.

Recommendations are provided to improve collaboration and training quality.

Abstract

Alongside software testing education in universities, a great extent of effort and resources are spent on software-testing training activities in industry. For example, there are several international certification schemes in testing, such as those provided by the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB), which have been issued to more than 914K testers so far. To train the highly qualified test engineers of tomorrow, it is important for both university educators and trainers in industry to be aware of the status of software testing education in academia versus its training in industry, to analyze the relationships of these two approaches, and to assess ways on how to improve the education / training landscape. For that purpose, this paper provides a pragmatic overview of the issue, presents several recommendations, and hopes to trigger further discussions in the community, between industry and academia, on how to further improve the status-quo, and to find further best practices for more effective education and training of software testers. The paper is based on combined ~40 years of the two authors' technical experience in test engineering, and their ~30 years of experience in providing testing education and training in more than six countries.