Back when I was at university we did about 2 hours on testing. In school my Computing A Level and previous studies had maybe half of that. In fact I hadn’t heard of a unit test before I started working. Testing as a practice involved some spreadsheets with inputs and expected outputs as far as I knew.
However this was decades ago.
I’d be interested in knowing from people who’ve completed their studies more recently, what level of insight do we get into testing and quality?
I finished my degree in 2019, and honestly, testing still seemed like a peripheral concern rather than an integral part of software development. We did cover unit testing and created some basic JUnit tests, but that was as far as it went. There was little knowledge about TDD, mocks, CI/CD pipelines, or the real-world project context of testing.
The industry has taught me much more about testing, and quality than the university ever did. So, you are certainly not alone testing and software quality have continually been de-emphasized in software engineering education vis-à-vis algorithms and theory.
When I was doing my graduation in engineering, for the first two years I was only familiar with development i.e. coding and programming.
When I entered my 3rd year of engineering and some of my seniors got placed as testers, so they told me about testing and things related to it. Most of them were on projects that followed the waterfall model, so they would describe their daily corporate life as very chill. They would tell me that for the whole day they remain chill or outside the office, and at the end of the day they get built for testing. So those kinds of conversations not only made me aware of testing but also about the pros of working in the waterfall model as a tester …
Fast forward to a couple of years… when I started appearing for testing interviews, then only I realized there is also an agile model, which is now more common than the waterfall model.
So somewhere I was aware of testing when I was in university, but not completely.
However, now some universities have started specialized engineering courses in testing, so that’s a big change I notice, from being something that always remained behind the scene and now being adapted as full engineering course… testing has obviously covered a long journey.
That’s an interesting thought on agile. So many teams struggle with it and perhaps the root of that lies in education too? Failing to prepare people for the real world.
That is interesting about the engineering courses though!
